The Year of Magical Thinking

Author: Joan Didion
Subject: Biography, non-fiction
Interview by Katie Couric (7 min)- click here
My rating: 5*
Keywords: grief, mourning, widow, acute infarct
Winner of the National Book Award

About the book:
In December 2003, the only daughter of Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, fell into septic shock from a runaway pneumonia infection. Her doctors put the young woman - she was married only five months earlier - into an induced coma. On the evening of Dec. 30, her parents returned from the hospital to their apartment. While the couple were talking over supper, John Gregory Dunne slumped in his chair with one hand raised, dying so suddenly that for a moment his wife mistook the event for a failed joke.
This powerful book is Didion's attempt 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."

From the book:
'Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.'

'In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.'