The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion's memoir records the year after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died at the dinner table and her daughter lay unconscious in an intensive care unit. The writing is controlled to the point of coldness, which is the point: grief is not warm, and magical thinking is not charming. The book is less a consolation than an anatomy of a mind trying to negotiate with absence, inventorying the small rituals that keep the dead provisionally alive.Knopf's edition presents the memoir in a small, plain hardcover format. Didion's prose acts as a kind of evidence bag, preserving the particulars before grief can blur them. It is a book that readers tend to buy in crisis and then leave on shelves, not because it failed but because it did exactly what it promised.
