The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005

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Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-13

Chapters 14-17

Chapters 18-22

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Key Figures

Joan Didion

Joan Didion (1934-2021) was an American author and journalist. Born in Sacramento, California, Didion was consumed with reading and writing from an early age. Her first published piece was a first prize-winning essay for Vogue, where she later worked for seven years. Didion gained acclaim in the 1960s and 70s, writing about celebrities and counterculture. In 1991, Didion wrote a piece on the Central Park Five, asserting that they had been wrongfully convicted. Didion’s work was hailed as groundbreaking and introspective by critics. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN Center USA and a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion presents herself as a woman who clings to rationality and research when faced with grief and the uncertainties of her daughter’s illness. As someone who has spent her life writing, she attempts to exert control over stressful situations by reading, questioning, and reflecting, as when she reads various medical books to learn more about her daughter’s condition. However, her tendency towards “magical thinking” also speaks to her habits as a writer: In attempting to “rewrite” the story of her husband’s death and leave open the possibility of his return, Didion tries to create an alternative narrative in which her husband does not die. By the end of the memoir, Didion has grown as both a woman and a writer in recognizing that some things are beyond her control and that her husband cannot return to her—it is through abandoning the false narrative created by her previous “magical thinking” that she is able to create the factual and deeply personal narrative of her grief in her memoir instead.

John Gregory Dunne

John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003) was an American writer and the husband of Joan Didion. Dunne graduated from Princeton University and worked as a writer for Time before focusing on other works. Dunne married Didion in 1964. The couple moved to California where they wrote a joint column for the Saturday Evening Post. He authored multiple novels and screenplays, including Nothing Lost, True Confessions, and the 1976 film A Star is Born, along with Didion and others. Dunne grew up Irish Catholic, and many of his works explore religious themes. Although Dunne struggled with the loss of his faith, he mentioned in several interviews that he wanted a Catholic priest at his bedside—a wish Didion honored at the hospital in 2003.

The Year of Magical Thinking is an exploration of Didion’s grief following the death of Dunne. Throughout the memoir, Didion both attempts to reconstruct the fragments of her life with her husband, while also struggling with the desire to keep him “alive” in the present through her hopes for his return. As she navigates her memories of their marriage, she rediscovers and learns different things about him: his forebodings of his own impending death, his desire to travel and have more fun with her before it was too late, his sense that he was losing his ability to write well. These discoveries and reconstructions of memory both enable Didion to reconnect with her husband and feel close to him again, while also gradually bringing her closer to acceptance of his death and her abandonment of “magical thinking.” At the end of the memoir, it is a memory of Dunne that helps her find a way forward: She remembers his calmness while swimming in a cave, interpreting it as a sign that she, too, must learn how to accept change. In this way, her husband continues to exercise an influence upon her life and thought even as she learns to accept he is no longer with her.

Quintana Roo Dunne

Quintana Roo Dunne (1966-2005) was the daughter of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. She was adopted by the couple in 1967, one year after she was born. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores her grief for her husband while handling the illness of her daughter. Quintana’s illness began with pneumonia and septic shock which resulted in a brain bleed, all detailed in Didion’s memoir. In her later memoir, Blue Nights, Didion grapples with the death of her daughter in 2005 from pancreatitis. In the 2017 documentary The Center Will Not Hold, Didion confesses that her daughter struggled with alcoholism, which contributed to her illnesses.

Quintana led a quiet life compared to the fame of her writer parents. Both Dunne and Didion were heavily influenced by their daughter and pieces of Quintana are found throughout their works. For example, in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes that Quintana frequently had nightmares about the Broken Man, attributing Quintana’s nightmares to her own fear of abandonment after being given up by her biological mother. Throughout The Year of Magical Thinking, Quintana’s illnesses are both a source of distraction from Didion’s grief as a widow and an ongoing source of “magical thinking,” as Didion is once again confronted with situations that she cannot hope to control.