She became famous for the precise crystalline quality of her prose, coolly and forensically dissecting the ugly realities of hippie counterculture of 1970s California, the moral void of Hollywood and the hypocrisies of American domestic and foreign policy.ĭidion’s essays and magazine articles were collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), and she had successes with her 1970 novel Play It as It Lays (which she later adapted for a film version in 1972) and A Book of Common Prayer in 1977. Like most cultural movements of the 1960s, the movement was dominated by men – Capote, Tom Wolfe (who coined the term “New Journalism” in 1973), Hunter S Thompson and Norman Mailer – in which Didion impressively held her own. Inspired by Truman Capote’s 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, the New Journalists approached their material from a subjective first-person perspective, often placing themselves as a character within and commenting on the action, and using metaphor, non-linear timelines and speculative rather than fact-based analysis to tell their story. A professional writer since her late teens, she moved effortlessly between journalism, political reportage, novels and film screenplays, the latter co-written with her husband John Gregory Dunne.ĭidion’s non-fiction writing became associated with the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Why it’s a classic: The Year of Magical Thinking was published in 2005 when Joan Didion was 71, and by then established as one of the finest American writers of her generation. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.” “ Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong,” she recalls. The book finishes with Joan’s memory of swimming with John near a cave in California, when Quintana was a child. Joan finally accept that John’s death was inevitable and that she must end her year of magical thinking. As the first anniversary of John’s death approaches, Joan receives the autopsy report of his death, which confirms that he died instantly. Despite her attempts at control, she is persistently haunted by memories of John and the young Quintana, recalling a number of conversations in which John had predicted his own death. Joan travels to Los Angeles to care for Quintana, carefully calibrating her movements so as not to enter “ the vortex” of painful memories of her earlier married life in California. Quintana slowly improves and leaves hospital, and is able to attend John’s funeral service, but suffers a brain haemorrhage a few weeks later. She also undertakes extensive reading about grief and mourning, noting the lack of useful writing and research on these subjects. She undertakes rigorous research about John’s death in the hope of spotting errors or oversights in his treatment, or a course of action that might have prevented his death. Joan struggles with irrational but persistent beliefs that he has not died and was buried alive (the “magical thinking” of the title), saving a pair of his shoes in case he should return. A hospital social worker describes Joan to a colleague as “ a pretty cool customer“, words that return to haunt her as she struggles to accept John’s death. The journalist, screenwriter and novelist Joan Didion provides an account of her grief process in the year following the sudden death of her husband, the screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, while their adult daughter Quintana is also in a medically-induced coma. In which I review The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir of the year following the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her adult daughter.
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