What is The Year of Magical Thinking about?

Joan Didion's account of the year following the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, is the most rigorous and unflinching memoir of grief in American literature. Dunne died of a massive coronary at the dinner table on December 30, 2003, as their daughter Quintana lay in a coma from septic shock in a New York hospital. Didion wrote the book over the following year, using her skills as a reporter and essayist to investigate grief with the same intellectual intensity she had applied to California politics and the Manson era.

The title refers to the irrational thinking that Didion recognized in herself in the months after Dunne's death: the belief, against all evidence, that he might return; the inability to give away his shoes because he would need them when he came back; the sense that certain thoughts or actions might cause or prevent catastrophe. She traces this magical thinking through anthropological and psychological literature — Kübler-Ross on stages of grief, studies of bereavement, clinical descriptions of grief's physical symptoms — and finds that what she experienced was not pathological but universal. The grief literature normalized what she had felt as private aberration.

The book is also about the specific texture of a long marriage — forty years between two writers whose careers and inner lives were deeply intertwined. Didion's account of her marriage is not idealized; she records their arguments, their professional competitions, their mutual dependency. This precision makes the loss more specific and therefore more legible. She is not mourning an abstraction; she is mourning this particular man with his particular habits and his particular voice at a particular dinner table.

Throughout the book, Quintana's illness — which worsened, improved, and then worsened again while Didion was writing — runs as a parallel narrative. Quintana died in August 2005, before the book was published. Didion addressed her daughter's death in a subsequent memoir, Blue Nights, but The Year of Magical Thinking was written while Quintana was still alive, and the sections where Didion watches her daughter fight for life carry a weight that the subsequent knowledge makes nearly unbearable.