The Year of Magical Thinking: A Play by Joan Didion Based on Her Memoir [Paperback]

“this happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you . . .”

In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir (which Michiko Kakutani inThe New York Timescalled “an indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage), Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play.

The first theatrical production ofThe Year of Magical Thinkingopened at the Booth Theatre on March 29, 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare.“Her book is thrilling . . . a living, sharp, memorable book . . . An exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement . . . sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth.”
–Robert Pinsky,The New York Times Book Review(cover)


“An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief . . . It also skips backward in time [to] call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage . . . To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost.”
–Lev Grossman,Time


“I can’t think of a book we need more than hers . . . I can’t imagine dying without this book.”
-John Leonard,New York Review of Books


“Achingly beautiful . . . We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is thus a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward.”
–Gideon Lewis-Kraus,Los Angeles Times


“Stunning candor and piercing details . . . An indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . [A] haunting portrait of a fourlĂ+