The Year of Magical Thinking

"A writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief is an act of consummate literary bravery."

A remarkable book of electrifying honesty and emotion from one of America's greatest authors. Anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or kid will be able to relate to Joan Didion's portrayal of a marriage and life, through good times and terrible. Didion delves deeply into a very personal but universal experience.

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw Quintana, their only child, get unwell a few days before Christmas 2003. Quintana first seemed to have the flu, then developed pneumonia, and finally succumbed to acute septic shock. She was put on life support and put into an induced coma. A few days later, on the eve of New Year's Eve, John Gregory Dunne had a large and deadly coronary as the Dunnes were just settling down to supper after their hospital visit. This forty-year tight, symbiotic friendship ended in an instant. Their daughter survived after four weeks. After landing at LAX two months later, she passed out and had six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to remove a large hematoma.

In this profound work, Didion attempts to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness, about marriage and children and memory, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."