Key themes
- Grief as a cognitive distortion — 'magical thinking' as the mind's refusal
- The couple as a single unit — and what remains when half is gone
- Writing as the thing that survives
About this book
A clear-eyed account of grief after the sudden loss of a husband; precise and unsparing.
Published in 2005, The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award. Didion wrote it in the year following her husband John Gregory Dunne's sudden death, while their daughter Quintana was also critically ill.
Discussion questions
- Didion describes magical thinking as the belief that she could reverse her husband's death through behaviour or ritual. Is this pathological or simply human — and what does the term say about how grief works?
- The book is simultaneously a memoir and a close reading of the medical record of her husband's final year. How does Didion's journalistic precision serve a subject that resists precision?
- Didion notes that grief is not what people expect — it is not sadness so much as absence and reorganisation. Which observations about grief did you find most exactly right?
- The book was written very quickly, apparently in a state of controlled compulsion. How does this origin show in the text — and does the speed of writing serve the subject?
- The Year of Magical Thinking became a reference point for writing about grief. What does it offer readers who are not themselves grieving — and what does it offer those who are?
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