Who

Joan Didion (1934–2021) was a groundbreaking, award-winning and bestselling author, journalist, screenwriter and playwright. Didion’s writing combined unsentimental, journalistic observation with deep humanity, solidifying her as one of the most distinctive literary voices of the 20th and 21st centuries.

What

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s recount of the year following her daughter’s severe illness and her husband’s sudden death—one of grief, love and survival. Inside the pages of this book is what she described as 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.”

It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. This year, this incomparable work of art celebrates its 20th anniversary.

& We

…chose to revisit this enduring classic because Didion’s timeless investigation of grief and love reminds us that even in the depths of loss, we can find meaning, connection, and the strength to go on. Enjoy.

Here’s Your Look Inside

In outline.

It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.

Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o'clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center's Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more commonly known as "Beth Israel North" or "the old Doctors' Hospital," where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

Excerpted from "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. Reprinted with permission from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2005 by Joan Didion.