The year of magical thinking – Joan Didion and the dialectic of grief

Abstract

In late 2003, while their daughter lay critically ill in hospital, American writer Joan Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne died suddenly. Theirs had been a marriage of great intimacy and love, and she was completely engulfed by grief. Nine months later, she started to write about the first 12 months of her bereavement. Raw, insightful and challenging, the resulting book, The Year of Magical Thinking, presents a vivid portrait of her journey. This article reviews the book and goes on to explore how Didion's account of her experience reflects past and current theories of grief and bereavement.

Keywords:

• Grief
• bereavement
• magical thinking
• Didion
• bereavement theory

Notes

This article first appeared in Medical Humanities 2008 34 35–39 and is reproduced here with permission from the BMJ Publishing Group.