The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
125 Rating(s)
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The Year of Magical Thinking

Bestseller

Author: Joan Didion

Narrator: Barbara Caruso

Unabridged: 5 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/06/2005

Synopsis

Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack.

This powerful and moving work 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."

With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. The Year Of Magical Thinking will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or child.

About Joan Didion

Joan Didion (1934-2021) was the National Book Award-winning author of many works of fiction and nonfiction. After earning a Bachelor’s degree in English at the University of California, Berkeley, she started her literary career writing articles and essays for Vogue, Mademoiselle, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and National Review, establishing herself as a prominent member of the New Journalism movement. Her books include The White Album, Play It As It Lays, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, Didion’s revelatory memoir The Year of Magical Thinking was adapted as a one-woman stage show starring Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway. She also wrote several screenplays with her husband John Gregory Dunne, including Panic in Needle Park with Al Pacino, the second remake of A Star is Born with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and an adaptation of her own Play It As It Lays with Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kim on February 07, 2010

You might think of me as a cynic. If you’re being kind, that is. I’m the one that says ’Seriously?’ when being told of some tragic event--like someone would actually make up the horrific thing. I’m the one that views the whole process of death--the telling, the grieving, the service of any kind, the......more

Goodreads review by emma on April 19, 2024

Nobody needs to be told, but it's true what everyone says about this book. It's stunningly beautiful and real. It's the best rendition of what it is to grieve I've ever read. And nobody needs to be told, either, what a loss it is to not have Joan and her writing and her voice with us anymore. But we a......more

Goodreads review by Always on September 20, 2020

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started reading this, I had just known it was Didion's most well known work, but I was kind of caught off guard to find out it was about her husband's death and the simultaneous acute illness of her daughter. I'm not completely sure I know how I felt about th......more

Goodreads review by Lisa of Troy on August 20, 2024

The Year of Magical Thinking is a transparent, heartrending memoir on grief. This book first came on my radar in James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read, but it caught my eye again when I watched the Netflix documentary: Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. In the documentary, Didion was so articulate t......more

Goodreads review by Kate on January 02, 2008

Joan Didion's daughter Quintana fell gravely ill and was hospitalized with a serious infection. She was placed in a medical coma and put on life support. Only weeks later, Joan's husband, John Dunne, was speaking with her from their living room after visiting their daughter in the hospital, stopped......more

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