The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion
Price : Rs 945

This book (Knopf) by iconic American novelist and essayist Joan Didion, known for celebrated collections like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, finds her writing about her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne’s death and the grief that follows even as her daughter Quintana battles a parallel medical emergency. Didion reads other writers’ accounts of loss like CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed–writing itself essential to this process of coming to terms. The memoir charts her 40-year marriage, and the ‘magical thinking’ she experiences, where she gives away Dunne’s clothes but cannot bring herself to give away his shoes, because he would need them when he returned. In 2007, Didion also adapted the book for Broadway, and in 2011 published Blue Nights, this time on the death of her daughter.