Books like The Year of Magical Thinking
After her husband's sudden death and her daughter's hospitalisation, Didion keeps a forensic record of what magical thinking her grief conjures and what it refuses to.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Year of Magical Thinking
Blue Nights
In the aftermath of her daughter Quintana's death, Didion turns the pale light of late summer on her own motherhood, her own failing body, and what it means to be the last one left.
M Train
Patti Smith writes from her Greenwich Village café over black coffee, mapping what she has lost and loved: her late husband Fred, pilgrimages to writers' graves and the Continental Drift Club she belongs to.
The Friend
When her longtime friend and mentor dies, a writer in New York inherits his enormous Great Dane, Apollo, and the dog, grieving too, moves into her small rent-stabilised apartment.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Seven weeks after his mother killed herself, Handke wrote this compact account of her life to keep her from vanishing into the ordinary.
Stay True
Hua Hsu remembers his friendship with Ken at Berkeley in the 1990s, zines, mixtapes and arguments about what was cool, and the random act of violence that ended it.
H Is for Hawk
After her father's sudden death, a Cambridge historian buys a goshawk and withdraws into training it, alongside a reading of T. H. White's own failed attempt.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Murakami reflects on decades of long-distance running and what the discipline has taught him about writing, ageing, and pain.
In Memory of Memory
A Russian poet sifts the boxes of a Jewish great-aunt into a century of letters, photographs, and reflections on what memory keeps and why.
A Woman's Story
Written after her mother's death, Ernaux's portrait of her mother, a factory girl who became a shopkeeper and wanted her daughter to rise.
A Man's Place
Ernaux writes about her father, a labourer who became the owner of a café-grocery in Normandy, and the distance her education put between them.
The Writing Life
Dillard's short book on the daily work of writing, the cabins and studies where she has done it, and what it costs, with a detour to a stunt pilot who wrote in the sky.
Men We Reaped
Jesmyn Ward remembers five young Black men from her Mississippi Gulf Coast town, her brother among them, who died in the space of four years, and asks what the country takes from them.