OVERVIEW
Everything changes in an instant.

In one instant, everything writer Joan Didion knew changed. Over dinner one night, her husband of 39 years – the writer John Gregory Dunne -- suffered a heart attack and died. Their only daughter, Quintana Roo, lay in a coma in the hospital. The unthinkable was happening and a brilliant writer was left to cope with it in the only way she knew how.

Written by Joan Didion based on her National Book Award winning memoir, THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING captures the compassion, humor and bewilderment of a fiercely intelligent woman whose world lurches suddenly from the ordinary to the unimaginable. A passionate study in the very personal processes of grief and resilience.

ABOUT THE PLAY
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, written by Joan Didion based on her celebrated memoir, opened March 29, 2007 on Broadway in a strictly limited, twenty-four-week engagement, starring one of the world's greatest living actresses, the Academy Award and Tony Award winner Vanessa Redgrave. The play was directed by Academy Award and Tony Award nominee David Hare, and won the 2007 Drama Desk Award and was nominated for a Tony Award.

Unlike the memoir, which focuses on her husband’s death during which Didion’s daughter was gravely ill, the play chronicles Didion’s grief about both her husband’s death, and her daughter’s two years later.

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California on December 5, 1934. Didion spent most of her childhood in Sacramento, except for several years during World War II, when she traveled across the county with her mother and brother to be near her father, who served in a succession of posts as an officer in the Army Air Corps. Her family had deep roots in the West; family tales of pioneer days informed her first novel, as well as her later memoir, “Where I Was From.” By her own account, Didion was a shy, bookish child, although she also pushed herself to overcome her shyness through acting and public speaking. In her final year at the University of California, Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. The first prize was a job in the magazine's New York office.

Didion remained at Vogue for two years, progressing from research assistant to contributing writer. At the same time, she published articles in other magazines and wrote her first novel, “Run River” (1963). Although the novel sold poorly, it attracted favorable reviews, and she was offered a contract to write a second book.

In 1964, Didion married John Gregory Dunne, an aspiring novelist who was writing for Time magazine. The couple moved to Los Angeles with the intention of staying six months and ended up making their home there for the next 20 years. The pair adopted a baby girl they named Quintana Roo, after the state on the eastern coast of Mexico.

The atmosphere of California in the 1960s provided Didion and Dunne with ample opportunities for writing in the personal mode that was becoming known as the New Journalism, also associated with the writers Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and Gay Talese. Didion's essays on the '60s counterculture were collected in the volume “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968). Published to critical acclaim, the book is one of the signature works of the decade. Didion's second novel, “Play It As it Lays “(1970), set among aimless souls adrift at the edges of the film industry, captured a mood of anomie and alienation that crept over the film colony at the decade's close.

Working in collaboration for the first time, Didion and Dunne wrote the screenplay for the film, “Panic in Needle Park” (1971). Set among homeless drug addicts in New York City, the film introduced film audiences to the actor Al Pacino. Their work on the film was much admired and the pair would become one of Hollywood's most sought-after screenwriting teams, a lucrative sideline to their journalism and fiction. Together, they wrote screenplays for the film adaptation of “Play It As it Lays” (1972); a remake of “A Star is Born” (1976), starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; the film version of her husband's novel “True Confessions” (1981); and “Up Close and Personal” (1996) with Robert Redford.

Didion published a second volume of essays, “The White Album,” in 1979. She had won a national reputation as an intensely acute social observer and prose stylist; her voice was admired for its gemlike precision and elegance. In the 1980s, Didion's interest turned to the state of her country's relations with its southern neighbors, examined in two book-length essays, “Salvador”(1983) and “Miami” (1987). Travels in Central America and the Pacific also provided the background for novels of political intrigue, including “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977), “Democracy” (1984) and “The Last Thing He Wanted” (1996).

Over the years, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne often found themselves in the position of explaining New York to Californians, and California to New Yorkers. In the mid 1980s, the couple moved back to New York City. Many of Didion's observations of the city appear in her essay collection “After Henry” (1992). Years of Didion's essays on American politics and government were collected in the volume “Political Fictions” (2001). Her thoughts turned back to California in “Where I Was From” (2003), a wide-ranging volume of reflections on California's past and present.

DIRECOTR’S NOTE
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 that Joan Didion wrote after the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, near the end of 2003. They had just returned from visiting their daughter, Quintana, in the hospital. Didion notes that she didn’t write anything else for a long time. When she did begin writing again the result was a memoir of the time following her husband’s death entitled The Year of Magical Thinking. The book is a chronicle of her grieving process and how she found herself coping with loss. The “magical thinking” of the title refers to commonly held beliefs in superstition and ritual - that the power of our thoughts can somehow actually change events that have already happened or are about to happen. We wear the lucky team jersey on the day of the big game, or we carry that rabbit’s foot or, in Joan Didion’s case, she actively tries to believe that the whole episode of her husband’s death isn’t real and he’ll come walking through the door of their apartment any minute. She can’t bring herself to give away Dunne’s shoes because he will need them when he comes back – the act of giving the shoes away would mean admitting his death. Somehow, by her “magical thinking,” Didion believes she’ll be able to return the world of before, while at the same time knowing the impossibility of this in her rational mind.
After her husband’s death, Didion looked around for useful literary works that dealt with grief and found precious few. So, in part, she set about to write The Year of Magical Thinking to help herself understand and get through her period of loss, and by extension help all of us understand something that we’ll all go through.

After the book was finished, but before it was published, Joan Didion’s daughter Quintana, died in August of 2005. Didion chose not to alter the memoir to add details about her daughter – instead she said that the book was finished and was about a marriage. She added that if she were to write about her daughter’s death it would be a separate and very different book. However, when she was persuaded to adapt the memoir into a play, her central narrative does shift to include the loss of Quintana. It is perhaps instructive to note that the memoir opens with the quote above (“Life changes fast, etc.”) but the play version begins with:

“This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you.
“And it will happen to you. The details will be different but it will happen to you.
“That’s what I’m here to tell you.”

And that’s what Didion does in the play – she makes us think about loss and grief in a way that we can all relate to. As her story unfolds in the play it seems even more immediate because of the aspect of live storytelling. Didion is a master of the art of writing – her choice of words is specific and clear. The dramatic chronicle of her struggle between her wishful (i.e. “magical”) thinking and her very practical side makes for an interesting play. The opening lines of the play say as much – she’s here to tell us that this will happen to us. Don’t be put off by the serious subject matter – Didion has much to tell us and does so with grace. We need to listen.

CONNECTIONS & CONTEXTS
• Joan Didion Interview: When Everything Changes
• NY Review of Books article on THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
• About the book, THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
• About John Gregory Dunne
• John Gregory Dunne’s NYT Obituary
• Quintana Roo Dunne Michael’s Obituary

RESOURCES

VIDEOS
• Joan Didion and Vanessa Redgrave talk about THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
• Excerpts from Vanessa Redgrave in THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING - Part 1 • Part 2
• Joan Didion talks about THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING on a Santa Monica Radio show - Part 1 • Part 2
• Joan Didion reading the last chapter from the book THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

INTERNET
• Official Broadway Site with load of other articles and interviews
• NPR Radio Interviews with Joan Didion
• Story, interview and excerpts from the book

FURTHER READING
• THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, by Joan Didion