The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Joan Didion: The author. California native.
• John Gregory Dunne: Husband of the author and an author in his own right.
• Quintana Dunne: Quintana Roo Didion. Daughter of the author.
• Gerry: Son-in-law of the author. Married to Quintana.
• Elena: Add a description of this character.
• Nick
• Alcestis
• Tony Dunne: The author's nephew (through marriage to her husband)
• Dominique: Nick and Lenny's daughter; murdered by strangulation
• Lynn Nesbit: The agent to the author and her late husband, a friend to both since the late sixties.
• Susan Traylor
• Morton
• Gawain
• Rose Aylmer
• Jose: Possibly the author's housekeeper. In the least, he is the one who cleans up the mess made from the author's husband's accident
• Teresa Kean
• Katharine Ross: Taught Quintana, the author's daughter, to swim
• Michael Flynn: One of the doormen at the housing complex in New York where the author lives
• Vasile Ionescu: One of the doormen at the housing complex in New York where the author lives
• Eric Lindemann: The chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940s
• Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: The chief obituary writer for the New York Times
• Tim Rutten: Close friend to the author and her late husband. A writer at the Los Angeles Times
• Gloria: The author's sister-in-law
• Harriet Burns: The author's husband's aunt
• Calvin Trillin: A close friend of the author and her late-husband. A speaker at the funeral ceremony
• David Halberstam: A close friend of the author and her late-husband. A speaker at the funeral ceremony
• Susanna Moore: A close friend of the author and her late-husband. Read "East Coker" at the late-husband's funeral ceremony
• Barry Farrell: A friend of the author and her late-husband. Conceived a daughter who bore the author's name.
• Gil Frank: The author's accountant in Los Angeles
• Kelley: The author's niece
• Lori: The author's niece
• Loudon Wainwright: The author's editor at LIFE Magazine
• Carolyn Lelyveld: A close friend to the author who died in May after the passing of Didion's husband
• Stephen: Quintana's uncle who died of self-inflicted wounds
• Joe Black: An American teacher the author and her husband met while in Java
• Gertrude Black: An American teacher whom the author and her husband met while spending time in Java
• Lenny: The author's sister-in-law. Nick's wife

Quotes edit see section history

• “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us”

• “Confronted with certain disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.”

• “People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”

• “Why do you always have to be right?Why do you always have to have the last word?For once in your life just let it go.”

• “Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.”

• “Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.”

• “People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as "dwelling on it."”

• “We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or worse, ourselves.”

• “We are not idealized wild things.”

• “The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking place. I look for resolution and find none.”

• “I also know that if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let them go in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.”

• ““As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.””

  Joan

• ““Fires said we were home. we had drawn the curtain, we were safe through the night.””

  Joan

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

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• Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

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• The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”

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• Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

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• “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,”

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• I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

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• Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

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• We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

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• “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense,” C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. “It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down.

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• “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• New York Hospital
• Los Angeles
• Beth Israel North: When the reader is introduced to the fact that the author's daughter is hospitalized, it is at this hospital where she is first interred.
• California
• Honolulu: A frequent retreat of the author and her family
• Paris
• Malibu
• Brentwood Park
• Boston
• Princeton
• St. John
• Santa Monica
• Sacramento: The author's birthplace and childhood home
• Franklin Avenue
• Tenko
• San Juan Bautista: Located in San Benito County, California. Home to an historical cathedral where the author married

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Pronouncement: the "sign-off" on a person's death
• Uncomplicated grief: also known as "normal bereavement" which typically presents in a life-changing situation and disappears as the person learns to cope with the change.
• Complicated grief: also known as "pathological bereavement" and persists without obvious adaptation over time to the stressor that caused it
• Re-grief therapy: A technique in which the bereaved person experiences the emotion that provoked the onset of grief
• Abreactions: or "emotional reliving"
• Midline shift: "brain pushed to the left side"
• Fixed and dilated pupils: FDPs, a neurological indication of death
• Anticoagulant: An indicator of the likelihood of bleeding when exposed to trauma
• International Normalized Ration: INR; an indicator of the level of anticoagulant in the blood
• Extubation: The removal of an endotracheal tube
• Kimura Box Test: Describe this term.
• Two-Point Discrimination Test
• Glasgow Coma Scale
• Glasgow Outcome Scale
• Acinetobacter baumannii: A bacteria typically found in hospitals which is resistant to vancomycin
• Lividity: After circulation ceases in the body, the pooling of blood in the lower parts of the body. Often used to determine how long the person has been dead

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Joan Didion (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Pulitzer Prize (Finalist, 2006: Biography or Autobiography)
• National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist, 2005: Autobiography/Memoirs)
• National Book Award (2005: Nonfiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.54

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( D ) › Didion, Joan
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Professionals & Academics › Journalists
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Specific Groups › Women
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Arts & Literature › Authors
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Memoirs

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history