Summary Of The Year Of Magical Thinking

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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is about a woman's life frantically being flipped upside down in the blink of an eye. The writer's husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, just after they had returned from the hospital where their only child, Quintana, was lying in a coma. This bleak book is a memoir of Johns's death, Quintana's illness, and Didion's efforts to make sense of a time when nothing adds up.
The Year of Magical Thinking opens with: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.” Starting a book that powerful sets the tone for the the book. Didion thinks about how after tragic and life-changing events a feeling of usualness …show more content…
She can’t read his obituary because she has allowed other people to think of John as dead but if she believed that he was he might never come back. She can’t give away his shoes, since she believes that he will need them when he returns. Didion’s magical thinking began with John’s autopsy, when she irrationally believes that, if the coroners can diagnose what happened to John, they will then be able to fix the problem and bring him back to life. When Quintana wakes from her coma in January of 2004, Didion tells her that her father has died, but later that night she asks after about her father again and can not grasp an understanding about him until months later. Quintana got discharged, but the next morning, she awakes with chest pain and a fever and is taken to Columbia Presbyterian, where she is diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism. She was placed on anticoagulant and got discharged a week later. The following week, Quintana tells her mother her and her husband Gerry are flying to Malibu to restart their life which Didion completely encouraged. Then realized, she must figure out how to restart her own
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