Year of Magical Thinking, The

Joan Didion's husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a sudden heart attack at their dinner table on December 30, 2003, the same week their daughter Quintana was hospitalized in a coma brought on by septic shock. The Year of Magical Thinking is the account Didion wrote in the twelve months that followed, working through what she came to call magical thinking: the private conviction, held against all evidence, that the right actions, or the right refusal to accept the facts, could bring her husband back. She could not give away his shoes, reasoning that he would need them when he returned.

The book is less a chronology of loss than an investigation of how grief actually behaves. Didion draws on medical literature, psychiatric research and her own contradictory memories to challenge the idea that mourning is simply intense sadness, arguing instead that it produces derangement, magical bargaining and a loosened grip on ordinary competence, even as American culture treats it as something to manage quietly and alone. Written between October and December 2004 and completed a year and a day after Dunne's death, it won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.