The Year of Magical Thinking
Didion is a journalist and she turned that precision on grief. The result is the most honest account of loss ever written.
Life Changes Fast
Joan Didion's 2005 memoir begins on the evening of December 30, 2003, when her husband of forty years, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a cardiac arrest at their dinner table while their daughter lay gravely ill in hospital. Didion writes about the year that followed with the same precision she brought to her journalism: the rituals, the irrational bargains with reality, the inability to give away her husband's shoes in case he came back. The title comes from the first lines she wrote after his death. The memoir won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
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"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
"Joan Didion
Didion wrote the memoir in eighty-eight days, beginning several months after her husband's death. She said she wrote it to understand what had happened and was surprised to find she had written a book rather than notes to herself.
The memoir was adapted into a one-woman Broadway play with Vanessa Redgrave in 2007. Didion's daughter Quintana Roos Dunne died before the play opened, making its examination of loss even more layered and unbearable.