The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir by Joan Didion about the year after the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. Shortly before Christmas 2003, the couple's only daughter, Quintana, fell gravely ill and was placed in an induced coma. A few nights later, after visiting her in the hospital, Dunne collapsed at the dinner table from a heart attack and died, ending a marriage and working partnership of forty years. In the months that followed, as Quintana recovered and then fell seriously ill again, Didion tried to understand what had happened. With the precise, unsentimental prose for which she was known, she examines grief, memory, marriage, illness and the irrational hopes that follow loss, including her own sense that her husband might somehow return. The book became a widely read account of mourning. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction.