JOAN DIDION: The Voice of Grief, Memory, and Literary Brilliance (Video)

Her 2005 memoir is a haunting psychological portrait of grief following the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, who collapsed at their dinner table just as their only daughter Quintana was fighting for her life in intensive care. In the year that followed, Didion kept waiting for John to return, refusing to donate his shoes because “he would need them when he came back.”

“I had to write that story,” Didion later said, “because I couldn’t understand what was happening to me.” 

“The Year of Magical Thinking” is her attempt to confront the chaos of loss, to trace the invisible logic of mourning, guilt, and memory. In her own words, writing the book felt like “an act of violence against myself.” 

For the first time in forty years, John was not her first reader, and that silence marked the end of a life they built together.

Tragically, just two years later, Didion lost her daughter too. She told that story in her second memoir, “Blue Nights”, an equally devastating reflection on motherhood, aging, and letting go.

Didion’s work, both as an author and essayist, redefined American nonfiction. “The Year of Magical Thinking” was written in just 88 days, published in 2005, and won the National Book Award. It was later adapted into a one-woman play that premiered on Broadway, making her grief resonate on stage as it had on the page. In her final years, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama.

Didion died in 2021 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. But her voice lives on, in her sentences, in her sharp clarity, and in books like “The Year of Magical Thinking”, which The New York Times called “vivid, sharp, and unforgettable... a book without which you can't imagine death.”

Newmag’s Armenian edition brings this essential work to new readers, those who know grief, and those who will one day meet it.