The Year of Magical Thinking

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall seriously ill and placed on life support. Days later the Dunnes were sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of 40 years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through, only to collapse again two months after at LA airport, and undergo six hours of brain surgery to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and 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."