Year of Magical Thinking
‘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*
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction: among them the great portraits of a decade in essays, ‘Sentimental Journeys’, ‘The White Album’, and ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’.