Joan Didion Wins National Book Award

Posted on November 17, 2005

Joan Didion has won the National Book Award for her book, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf), a moving memoir about the year in which her husband died and her daughter became seriously ill.

In a night when honorary winner Norman Mailer likened the literary novel to the horse and buggy, National Book Award judges helped canonize what is sure to become a classic of nonfiction: Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking."
Didion's memoir about the death of her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, brought the 70-year-old writer her first National Book Award in her 40-year career and continued a wave of virtually nonstop praise since the book came out a month ago.
"There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you," Didion said Wednesday night, praising her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, for supporting her as she wrote her painfully personal best seller.
Didion has long been idolized by writers for her precise, incisive fiction and literary journalism. But "The Year of Magical Thinking" brought her a large readership, too, with booksellers saying that her memoir has been especially in demand from those who lost a loved one or knew someone who had.

Didion's win was not a surprise. But apparently everyone was pretty shocked when the fiction award was announced. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann (Viking) is a "800-page novel, complete with footnotes, about Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II." Somehow we must have missed that one. But we know a World War II buff who would love to receive it for Christmas.