![]() ![]() The play expands upon the memoir by dealing with Quintana's death. On March 29, 2007, Didion's adaptation of her book for Broadway, directed by David Hare, opened with Vanessa Redgrave as the sole cast member. ![]() Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative." The New York Review of Books declared, "I can't imagine dying without this book." The American Prospect's mixed review found that the book read "like a Warren Report on the death of LBJ." In 2019, the book was ranked 40th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. The New York Times Book Review praised the memoir as "not a downer. Instead she devoted a second book, Blue Nights, to her daughter's death. Quintana Roo Dunne Michael died of pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, before the book's publication, but Didion did not revise the manuscript. Notes she made during Quintana's hospitalizations became part of the book. Her daughter's continuing health problems and hospitalizations further compound and interrupt the natural course of grief.ĭidion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking between October 4 and December 31, 2004, completing it a year and a day after Dunne died. Fleeting memories of events and persistent snippets of past conversations with John take on a new significance. She is haunted by questions about the medical details of her husband's death, the possibility that he sensed it in advance, and how she might have made his remaining time more meaningful. Through observation and analysis of changes in her own behavior and abilities, she indirectly expresses the toll her grief is taking. ĭidion applies the reportorial detachment for which she is known to her own experience of grieving there are few expressions of raw emotion. The experience of insanity or derangement that is part of grief is a major theme, about which Didion was unable to find a great deal of existing literature. Didion reports many instances of her own magical thinking, particularly the story in which she cannot give away Dunne's shoes, as he would need them when he returned. The title of the book refers to magical thinking in the anthropological sense, thinking that if a person hopes for something enough or performs the right actions then an unavoidable event can be averted. Didion also incorporates medical and psychological research on grief and illness into the book. With each replay of the event, the focus on certain emotional and physical aspects of the experience shifts. The book follows Didion's reliving and reanalysis of her husband's death throughout the year following it, in addition to caring for Quintana. She had returned to Malibu, her childhood home, after learning of her father's death. During 2004 Quintana was again hospitalized after she fell and hit her head disembarking from a plane at LAX. Days before his death, their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne Michael was hospitalized in New York with pneumonia which developed into septic shock she was still unconscious when her father died. The book recounts Didion's experiences of grief after Dunne's 2003 death. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction Īnd was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Published by Knopf in October 2005, The Year of Magical Thinking was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), by Joan Didion (1934–2021), is an account of the year following the death of the author's husband John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003). ![]()
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