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The cover of The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion, 2006

Joan Didion traces the mind’s struggle with sudden loss, following grief, memory, illness, and the fragile effort to make a life after everything changes.

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13 parts, about 19 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • A first person record of the year after a sudden death, showing how a lucid mind can still quietly refuse the fact
  • Names the private logic of grief, the rituals and kept objects, so a mourner can recognise it instead of feeling mad
  • Tests memory against hospital records and autopsy notes, refusing both easy comfort and a neat lesson about loss

Who it is for

  • People in the first months after losing a spouse
  • Relatives managing a loved one's long hospital crisis
  • Readers who want grief described without consolation

What the summary covers

  1. The Ordinary Instant1 min
  2. Dinner, Then the Hospital2 min
  3. The Mind That Will Not Accept the Fact2 min
  4. Two Emergencies at Once1 min
  5. Warning Signs and Retrospective Knowledge2 min
  6. The Vortex1 min
  7. Rehabilitation Is Not a Return to Before2 min
  8. The Damaged Self2 min
  9. The Life They Did Not Quite Make1 min
  10. What Grief Actually Is2 min
  11. What the Records Can and Cannot Tell Us1 min
  12. Widow, Writer, Mother1 min
  13. The Broken Man and the Moving Earth1 min

Recommended by

  • Zadie SmithNovelist and essayist
    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.
  • Nick LairdPoet and novelist
    A great book, a great work. Angular, exact, pressured and tough, precise as a diamond drill bit.

About the author

  • Joan DidionAmerican writer and journalist who died in 2021, a pioneer of New Journalism
    • Born December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California
    • B.A. in English from UC Berkeley, 1956
    • Seven years at Vogue, 1956 to 1964
    • First nonfiction book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968
    • Wrote screenplays with husband John Gregory Dunne
    • Won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction for this memoir
    • National Humanities Medal, 2013
    • Relation to the book: began writing it October 4, 2004, documenting her husband's death and daughter's illness

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