Year of Magical Thinking, The

On December 30, 2003, the writer John Gregory Dunne collapses at the dinner table and dies of a heart attack. His wife, Joan Didion, is beside him. The same week, their daughter Quintana lies in a hospital in a coma brought on by septic shock. This memoir is Didion's account of the year that follows.

Didion describes what she came to call magical thinking: a private conviction, held against all the evidence, that the right actions or a refusal to accept the facts could bring her husband back. She cannot give away his shoes, because she reasons he will need them when he returns.

The book is non-fiction, part memoir and part investigation. Instead of laying out the loss in order, Didion turns to medical literature, psychiatric research and her own contradictory memories to ask how grief actually behaves. She argues that mourning produces derangement, bargaining and a loosened hold on ordinary competence, and that American culture expects people to manage it quietly and alone.

Didion wrote it from October to December 2004, finishing on the first anniversary of Dunne's death plus one day. The 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction went to it, and it was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Reading it is a spare, exact and often unsettling experience, useful to anyone who has lost someone or wants to understand what that does to the mind.