![]() ![]() The storyline for The Year of Magical Thinking (a title which takes its inspiration from the anthropological use of the term “magical thinking”, by which catastrophic events can be averted) is simply the rollercoaster of Didion’s grief in the aftermath of Dunne’s death. Joan Didion with her husband John Gregory Dunne in 1977. Mainly, though, everyone was fascinated by the authorial persona, the hypersensitive neurasthenic who drove a Corvette Stingray, the frail gamine with the migraine headaches and the dark glasses and the searchlight mind, the writer who seemed to know in her bones what readers were afraid to face, which is that the centre no longer holds, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, the storyline is broken.” People were intrigued by Play It as It Lays, Didion’s second novel, which came out two years later (though it got some hostile reviews). Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, captures the essence of Didion: “People liked the collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (though it was not, at first, a big seller). Taken together, these two books, but especially Magical Thinking, consolidate Didion’s formidable reputation as one of the US’s greatest postwar exponents of first-person reportage. In Blue Nights, published six years later, Didion sets out to write Quintana’s elegy, but understandably and perhaps inevitably, can scarcely bring herself to face the task. Less than two years later, she died of acute pancreatitis at the age of 39, after a series of traumatic hospitalisations and just before the publication of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion’s bestselling book to date. During 2004, Quintana recovered, then collapsed again with bleeding in her brain. Indeed, Quintana was still unconscious in the intensive care unit of Beth Israel North hospital when her father died. Interpolated in the agony of this tale is the parallel drama of their daughter Quintana’s medical emergency, hospitalised in New York with a case of pneumonia that became septic shock. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”) Surgical in its exquisite precision, and finally serene, Didion’s memoir helps to purge her grief and to set her loss in the new context of widowhood. ![]() “Misery memoirs” are commonplace today – Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story (2011) is a typical example – but Didion’s contribution to the genre raised it to the status of literature, a point acknowledged by the playwright David Hare, who directed the author’s own version in a stage adaptation starring Vanessa Redgrave in 2007.Ĭold, clear, precise, and with her emotions mostly held in check through a web of words, Didion narrates a year that began when her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, collapsed from a fatal heart attack in the couple’s Upper East Side apartment on the evening of 30 December 2003. The result is a classic of mourning that’s also the apotheosis of baby-boomer reportage, a muted celebration of the enthralling self. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends Joan Didion
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