The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion • 2005
Devastation Rating
grief marriage death memoir
Our Take
Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne died at the dinner table on December 30, 2003. She kept his shoes for a year because he would need them when he came back. That logic is the book's subject — the way grief bypasses reason and the way reason eventually bypasses grief. Nothing is more precisely observed.
Appears In
► More Grief Memoirs — Writing Through the Unbearable ► Facing Death — Literature for the Dying and Those Who Love Them ► Infertility and Miscarriage — The Grief That Waits ► Grief and Time — The Calendar of Loss ► Books for the Grieving — Not Self-Help, Just Witness ► Pregnancy Loss and Infant Grief — The Grief Nobody Prepared You For
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