The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion
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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
‘A beautiful and devastating book’
ZADIE SMITH
The Year of Magical Thinking speaks beautifully and heart-rendingly of the power love has to give life meaning.
When Joan Didion’s husband died suddenly of a massive heart attack, a partnership of 40 years ended in a second. Just days before, the couple had seen their only daughter fall seriously ill. Despite the unshakable reality of her husband’s death, Joan Didion’s thinking was far from down to earth – she found herself, for instance, keeping his shoes in case he returned. Slowly she realised that beneath all the ritual and words lay a simple, aching truth – that she longed to perform an impossible trick and bring him back. This is the story of a year spent wishing; a year of magical thinking.
‘A poised, heart-rending memoir’
JOYCE CAROL OATES
‘A masterpiece of restraint and perception’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Wise and profoundly affecting’
CRAIG BROWN, MAIL ON SUNDAY
Quintana Roo, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, Malibu, 1976
The Year of Magical Thinking
JOAN DIDION
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2005
Copyright © Joan Didion 2005
Joan Didion asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007318001
Version: 2017-03-16
From the reviews of The Year of Magical Thinking:
‘This is a beautiful and devastating book by one of the finest writers we have. Didion has always been a precise, humane and meticulously truthful writer, but on the subject of death she becomes essential’
ZADIE SMITH
‘The book of the year … a heartbreaking, passionate book that offers no easy answers’
Guardian
‘A poised, heart-rending memoir’
JOYCE CAROL OATES
‘Joan Didion has produced, with desperate honesty, a book about loss and grief … It is astonishing to find a great subject, in all its sorrow, meeting its match in one of the true talents of our age’
COLM TóIBíN
‘A gripping account of the workings of bereavement and grief, unflinchingly analysed’
HERMIONE LEE, TLS
‘I read The Year of Magical Thinking in a sitting and can’t get over it. It’s not merely my book of the year, but one of my books of the decade. The precision of the memoir is astonishing, the value of the lives immeasurable. As a portrait of a marriage and an encapsulation of the writing life, as a commemoration of grief and a testament of love, this is a book that will never leave the mind of anyone who reads it’
ANDREW O’HAGAN, Scotsman
‘A luminously shocking memoir of bereavement … Her triumph is to show us that artifice – the shaping of prose, the arrangement of memory – need not strip the rawness of lived experience of its power’
ALEX CLARK, Daily Telegraph
‘The Year of Magical Thinking is in fact a year of lucid and rational thinking, about grief and mourning and feared loss; this account of a husband’s death and daughter’s grave illness is the more moving for not trying to be’
JULIAN BARNES
‘Her book, exploring an agonising universal experience, will speak to and maybe comfort anyone who has lost for ever the one they loved’
VAL HENNESSY, Daily Mail
‘You get her peerless sharp, stylish reporting and almost forensic attention to detail. To see her turning these instruments on her own ordeal is as shocking as it is moving. Grief, writes Didion, takes us to a place none of us knows till we reach it’
DAVID ROBSON, Daily Express
‘A masterpiece of restraint and perception … Utterly compelling’
Sunday Times
‘Wise and profoundly affecting’
CRAIG BROWN, Mail on Sunday
‘A masterpiece … dense with sentiment, without ever being sentimental, tough, witty, broken, tender and flawlessly sustained. The amount of risk in her writing is extraordinary and exemplary’
ADAM THIRLWELL, Observer
‘A spell-bindingly clear-eyed account of bereavement’
Evening Standard
‘An exceptional study of the nature of grief’
Independent on Sunday
‘Didion skilfully illuminates past happiness, a marriage close as a shared breath … a remarkable writer … a brave book’
MIRANDA SEYMOUR, Sunday Times
‘Taking the reader to places where they would not otherwise go is, of course, one of the things a really good book can do. Powerful, moving and true’
CRESSIDA CONNOLLY, Spectator
‘The book achieves something that Didion herself thought impossible – it gives voice to the most inarticulate of emotions.