The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir by Joan Didion, accounting of the year following the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne in 2003. Published by Knopf in October 2005, The Year of Magical Thinking was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. In 2024, The New York Times Book Review ranked The Year of Magical Thinking as the 12th best book of the 21st century. It was adapted into a play in 2007.