Overview

From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion. 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*

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9780007216857

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Reviews

"'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.' John Freeman, Independent 'Ultimately, and unexpectedly for a book about illness and death, this is a wonderfully life affirming book.' Lisa O'Kelly, 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.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator 'A great book, a great work. Angular, exact, pressured and tough, precise as a diamond drill bit.' Nick Laird 'Didion's famously sparse, honed, almost brittle prose spells out an anguish which is universal. Her book, exploring an agonising universal experience, will speak to and maybe comfort anyone who has lost for ever the one they loved.' Val Hennesy, Critics Choice, Daily Mail 'Cool has been Didion's literary trademark, but this brave book maps a year in her life when the world flipped over to expose the underside of cool where things go bad.' The Times"

'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.' John Freeman, Independent 'Ultimately, and unexpectedly for a book about illness and death, this is a wonderfully life affirming book.' Lisa O'Kelly, 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.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator 'A great book, a great work. Angular, exact, pressured and tough, precise as a diamond drill bit.' Nick Laird 'Didion's famously sparse, honed, almost brittle prose spells out an anguish which is universal. Her book, exploring an agonising universal experience, will speak to and maybe comfort anyone who has lost for ever the one they loved.' Val Hennesy, Critics Choice, Daily Mail 'Cool has been Didion's literary trademark, but this brave book maps a year in her life when the world flipped over to expose the underside of cool where things go bad.' The Times 'Didion's way of working through her grief is as remarkable as it is moving.' Daily Express A marvellously acute anatomy of grief!it must have been a help to write it, and it should be a help to others too.' Sunday Telegraph 'Grief, [Didion] observes, is an emotion the modern world shies away from. Didion's courage in confronting it is inspirational.' Mail on Sunday

Author Information

Joan Didion is one of America's most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.

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