‘This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you…’
Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later – the night before New Year’s Eve – the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion's ‘attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself’.
*Notes to John, the remarkable recently discovered journal from Joan Didion is available now*
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780007270743
Number of pages: 96
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 10 mm
Weight: 100 g
Language: English
Reviews for the memoir: ‘It is the most awesome performance of both participating in, and watching, an event. Even though Didion does not allow herself to break down, only a terribly controlled reader will resist doing the same.’ Independent ‘Ultimately, and unexpectedly for a book about illness and death, this is a wonderfully life affirming book.’ Observer ‘Searing, informative and affecting. Don’t leave life without it.’ Financial Times ‘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 ‘Taking the reader to places where they would not otherwise go is one of the things a really good book can do. “The Year of Magical Thinking” does just that, and brilliantly. Powerful, moving and true.’ Spectator ‘A great book, a great work. Angular, exact, pressured and tough, precise as a diamond drill bit.’ Nick Laird
Much Ado About Nothing
All My Sons
The Merchant of Venice
Four Major Plays
The Tempest
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
A View from the Bridge
Romeo and Juliet
Twelfth Night
Five Plays
A Midsummer Night's Dream
This is the book that Didon wrote after the very sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, at home over dinner. At the same time her daughter was seriously ill in hospital, and was not aware of her fathers... More
Excellent writing
“About five in the afternoon on the 24th I thought I could not do the evening but when the time came the evening did itself.”
More than a manual for surviving grief, Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” is...
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