The Year of Magical Thinking: A Play by Joan Didion Based on Her Memoir by Joan

Description: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion " this happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you . . ."In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir (which Michiko Kakutani in "The New York Times "called " an indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage), Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play.The first theatrical production of "The Year of Magical Thinking" opened at the Booth Theatre on March 29, 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir, Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play."This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it wont when it happens to you...." Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times called the memoir that was the basis for the play, "an indelible portrait of loss and grief ... a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage."The first theatrical production of The Year of Magical Thinking opened at the Booth Theatre on March 29, 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare. Author Biography JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didions other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Didions first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundations Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didions distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists." In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USAs Lifetime Achievement Award.Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what Im thinking, what Im looking at, what I see and what it means." She died in December 2021. Review "Her book is thrilling ... a living, sharp, memorable book ... An exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement ... sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth." —Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review"An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief ... It also skips backward in time [to] call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage ... To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost." —Lev Grossman, Time"I cant think of a book we need more than hers ... I cant imagine dying without this book." —John Leonard, New York Review of Books"Achingly beautiful ... We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is thus a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward." —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Los Angeles Times"Stunning candor and piercing details ... An indelible portrait of loss and grief ... [A] haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Long Description " this happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it wont when it happens to you . . ." In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir (which Michiko Kakutani in "The New York Times "called " an indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage), Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play. The first theatrical production of "The Year of Magical Thinking" opened at the Booth Theatre on March 29, 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare. Review Quote "Her book is thrilling . . . a living, sharp, memorable book . . . An exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement . . . sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth." Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review (cover) "An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief . . . It also skips backward in time [to] call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage . . . To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost." Lev Grossman, Time "I cant think of a book we need more than hers . . . I cant imagine dying without this book." -John Leonard, New York Review of Books "Achingly beautiful . . . We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is thus a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward." Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Los Angeles Times "Stunning candor and piercing details . . . An indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . [A] haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Excerpt from Book 1 This happened on december 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it wont when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. Thats what Im here to tell you. We had come home. "Home" meaning an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Early evening, maybe eight oclock. We discussed whether to go out or eat in. I said we could stay in, I would build a fire. The fire was the point. In California we heated our houses by building fires. In Malibu we built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I built the fire. I drew the circle. I have no memory of what I meant to have for dinner. Memory stops. The frame freezes. Youll find thats something that happens. I warned you. Im telling you what you need to know. You see me on this stage, you sit next to me on a plane, you run into me at dinner, you know what happened to me. You dont want to think it could happen to you. Thats why Im here. John was in his office. I got him a drink. He sat down by the fire to read. He was reading a bound galley of David Fromkins Europes Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? I set the table in the living room, where we could see the fire. I must have noticed that later. The name of the book. I eventually read it myself, but found no clues. Wait. I was telling you what happened. He wanted a second drink. I got it. He asked if I had used single-malt scotch for the second drink. I said I had used whatever I used for the first drink. "Good," he said. "I dont know why but I dont think you should mix them." I was at the table, making a salad. He was sitting across from me, talking. Either he was talking about why World War One was the event from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed or he was talking about the scotch, I have no idea which. Then he wasnt. Wasnt talking. I looked up. I said, "Dont do that." I thought he was making a joke. Slumping over. Pretending to be dead. Youve seen people make that kind of tiresome joke. Maybe youve done it yourself. Meaning "this was a hard day, we got through it, were having dinner, weve got a fire." In fact neither of us had yet said out loud how hard that day had been. My next thought was that he had started to eat and choked. I tried to move him so I could do the Heimlich. He fell onto the table, then to the floor. There was a dark liquid pooling beneath his face. Within what I now know to have been exactly five minutes, two ambulances came. The crews worked on the living room floor for what I now know to have been exactly forty-five minutes. I now know these facts because I obtained the documents. I obtained the Emergency Department Nursing Documentation Sheet. I obtained the Nursing Flow Chart. I obtained the Physicians Record. I obtained the log kept by the doormen in our building."Paramedics arrived at 9:20 PM for Mr. Dunne," the log read."Mr. Dunne was taken to the hospital at 10:05 PM." The distance from our apartment to the ambulance entrance of New York Cornell is six crosstown blocks. I do not remember traffic. I do not remember sirens. When I got out of the ambulance the gurney was already being pushed inside. Everyone was in scrubs. I noticed one man who was not in scrubs. "Is this the wife," he said to the driver. Then he looked at me. "Im your social worker." And I guess that was when I knew. Thats something else to remember. If they give you a social worker, youre in trouble. 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. Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. And after that-- Im a writer-- But after that I didnt write anything for a long while. For several weeks after it happened I tried different strategies for keeping on the correct track. One that worked for a while was repeating to myself the last two lines of "Rose Aylmer," Walter Savage Landors 1806 elegy to the memory of a daughter of Lord Aylmers who had died at age twenty in Calcutta. I had not thought of "Rose Aylmer" since I was at Berkeley, but now I could remember not only the poem but much of what was said about it in whichever class I heard it analyzed. "Ah what avails the sceptred race!" it begins. "Ah what the form divine! When every virtue, every grace, Rose Aylmer, all were thine!" "Rose Aylmer" worked, the lecturer said, because the overblown and therefore meaningless praise in those first lines gets thrown into sudden, even shocking relief by what he called "the hard sweet wisdom" of the last, which suggest that grief has its place but also its limits: "A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee." "A night of memories and sighs," he repeated. "A night. One night. It might be all night but he doesnt say all night, he says a night, not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours." Hard sweet wisdom. Clearly, since "Rose Aylmer" remained embedded in my memory, I believed it to offer a lesson for survival. 2 I told you I knew when I saw the social worker but I didnt really. Or more correctly--"correctly" is important to me--I knew but I refused to know. Theres a certain kind of personality--my own, maybe yours--that sets great store on seeing it straight. For certain of us this is a big ego point. You might think youll see it straight but you wont. Youll be standing in some ER and at one level youll have a pretty clear idea of whatever it was that just happened but youll see it as a kind of first draft. Notice the evasion there. "Whatever it was that just happened." The actual words will have vanished from your accessible vocabulary. The only words at hand will have to do with how this can be corrected. Reversible error. If youre a lawyer youre probably thinking she doesnt know what "reversible error" means, but I do. There was a verdict here. Find the right error and the verdict gets thrown out. And errors are easy to find. If youre me. For example this is the wrong hospital. This is a perfectly good hospital but its not "our" hospital. Its New York Presbyterian Cornell. "Our" hospital is New York Presbyterian Columbia, a hundred blocks uptown. So while I stand in line to show the insurance cards--nobody told me to stand in this line but I see it as a constructive step, proof that Im handling the situation--I tell myself that as soon as he is stabilized I can move him to Columbia. He will need a bed with telemetry. When I arrange the move I need to specify this. Notice that only "I" can do this. I do not distrust those in charge here, but I do feel compelled to manage them. I go further. I see a plan falling into place. Once Quintana is stabilized I can also move her to Columbia. Maybe I didnt mention this before. New York Cornell is not our first hospital of the evening. The first hospital of the evening was Beth Israel North. You know, the one that used to be Doctors Hospital. Across from Gracie Mansion. Where our daughter has been in an induced coma in the sixth-floor ICU since Christmas night with what began as the flu and is now septic shock. Another case of the wrong hospital. From my point of view. But just try telling a grown child that the easiest emergency room on the Upper East Side doesnt necessarily add up to the right hospital. Try telling her anything, once they sedate her for the endotracheal tube. Must you always have the last word, John said when we fought.Which was often. Must you always be right. For once in your life just let it go. When we saw her tonight in the ICU her hair was damp and matted from the fever. No one seems to have brushed it. I have been trying to brush it since the day after Christmas but cannot. I could always brush her hair. I could brush her hair even in Malibu, when it was long and bleached from the sun and green from the chlorine in swimming pools and she had been in the water all day. She would come up from the beach and John would wrap her in towels on the deck outside his office and I would brush her hair. "I love you more than even one more day," he said to her tonight in the ICU. He said that on each of the five nights he saw her there. On the chance she could hear. He said it tonight just before we came home and discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in. Just before I built the fire-- No. The lights are too bright in this hospital. Its too cold. If I hold focus I can arrange for both of them to recuperate at Columbia. Adjoining rooms. The McKeen Pa Details ISBN0307386414 Author Joan Didion Short Title YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING Language English ISBN-10 0307386414 ISBN-13 9780307386410 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2007 DEWEY 812.54 Residence New York, NY, US DOI 10.1604/9780307386410 Subtitle A Play by Joan Didion Based on Her Memoir Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2007-05-15 NZ Release Date 2007-05-15 US Release Date 2007-05-15 UK Release Date 2007-05-15 Pages 80 Publisher Random House USA Inc Series Vintage International Publication Date 2007-05-15 Imprint Random House Inc Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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