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Article: The Year of Magical Thinking.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- July 25, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Year of Magical Thinking. By Joan Didion. Knopf, 240 pp., $23.95.
IN THIS award-winning memoir, Joan Didion, a premier observer of contemporary life, witnesses death. It walks into her New York apartment on December 30, 2003, approaches the dinner table and claims her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, who falls dead of a heart attack. Didion presents with dry clarity what happens in the year after that. Not reason, not acceptance, just observation, a reporter's stance that looks like detachment, making the new widow seem a cool customer at the hospital where Dunne has been pronounced dead.
"Life changes fast," Didion writes in the book's ...