Thursday, November 10, 2005

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, Joan Didion (Wikipedia: Joan Didion), comes up with a powerful collection of personal essays. The Year of Magical Thinking is the year after the death of the author's husband, John Gregory Dunne (Wikipedia: John Gregory Dunne), with whom she shared more than 40 years of her married life.

From The Washington Post's Book World:

Out of excruciatingly painful personal experience, Joan Didion has written a lacerating yet peculiarly stirring book "about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." In December 2003 two terrible things happened: her only child, Quintana, married months earlier, was hospitalized in a coma, and five days later her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died "in the living room of our apartment in New York [after] a sudden massive coronary event" just as he and Didion were about to have dinner. For more than a year, Didion's life was completely taken over by these events; The Year of Magical Thinking is the story of that year.


Related:
Mourning Becomes Joan Didion

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