THIRLWELL, Observer
‘A spell-bindingly clear-eyed account of bereavement’
Evening Standard
‘An exceptional study of the nature of grief’
Independent on Sunday
‘Didion skilfully illuminates past happiness, a marriage close as a shared breath … a remarkable writer … a brave book’
MIRANDA SEYMOUR, Sunday Times
‘Taking the reader to places where they would not otherwise go is, of course, one of the things a really good book can do. Powerful, moving and true’
CRESSIDA CONNOLLY, Spectator
‘The book achieves something that Didion herself thought impossible – it gives voice to the most inarticulate of emotions. It is an extraordinarily eloquent cry of pain’
LISA ALLARDICE, New Statesman
‘Α rare example of a book which is both raw and thoughtful’
MARK LAWSON, Sunday Telegraph
‘The Year of Magical Thinking is powerfully moving, a work of surpassing clarity and truthfulness … quite unlike any other memoir I’ve read. As with most truly great books, there are no bogus resolutions. Questions are unanswered, huge tensions unresolved, but somehow you’re consoled: it’s really a book about living’
JOSEPH O’CONNOR, Irish Independent
‘Will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife or child’
Economist
‘Cool has been Didion’s literary trademark, but this brave book maps a year in her life when the world flipped over to expose the underside of cool where things go bad’
The Times
‘I can’t think of a book we need more than hers. I can’t imagine dying without this book’
JOHN LEONARD, New York Review of Books
‘Stunning candour and piercing details. An indelible portrait of loss and grief. A haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage’
MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times
This book is for John and for Quintana
Contents
Cover Excerpt Title Page Copyright Review Dedication 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Excerpt from Blue Nights, a sequel to The Year of Magical Thinking Chapter 1:Blue Nights Chapter 2:Blue Nights About the Author Also By Joan Didion About the Publisher
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.
Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.
For a long time I wrote nothing else.
Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.
At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant.” I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word “ordinary,” because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. “He was on his way home from work—happy, successful, healthy—and then, gone,” I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an “ordinary Sunday morning” it had been. “It was just an ordinary beautiful September day,” people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and
