The Year of Magical Thinking

Winner of the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

From one of America’s iconic writers, this acclaimed memoir recounts the year following the sudden death of the author’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003 and her experience with grief, memory, and survival. Several days before Christmas 2003, Didion and Dunne’s only daughter, Quintana, fell seriously ill and was placed in an induced coma. Days later, on New Year’s Eve, Dunne suffered a fatal coronary while they were sitting down to dinner. In the powerful narrative that follows, Didion explores her “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.” Her meticulous prose transforms deeply personal loss into a work of universal resonance and insight into the nature of mourning.

“An utterly shattering portrait of loss and grief.” — The New York Times

“Didion has transformed grief into literature.” — The Guardian