The Year of Magical Thinking was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2005, and it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The book chronicles the year following the sudden death of Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, on December 30, 2003, from a massive coronary — an event that occurred while their only daughter, Quintana Roo, lay in a medically induced coma at Beth Israel Medical Center.
Didion applies to her own grief the same analytical method she had applied to American culture for four decades: close observation, precise notation, the refusal to sentimentalize or to accept easy consolation. The “magical thinking” of the title refers to the irrational beliefs that grief produces: Didion cannot give away her husband’s shoes because he will need them when he comes back; she reads medical literature as if understanding the physiology of death could reverse it; she replays the evening of his death obsessively, looking for the moment when she might have intervened.
The book’s power comes from the tension between Didion’s literary intelligence (which knows that her husband is dead and will not return) and her grief’s stubborn irrationality (which refuses to accept this knowledge). This tension — between knowing and feeling, between the writer’s trained attention and the mourner’s helplessness — gives the book its extraordinary emotional force.
The memoir was adapted into a one-woman Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave (2007).
Collecting The Year of Magical Thinking
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $8–$20