Joan Didion
In late December 2003, Joan Didion’s daughter goes into septic shock from pneumonia, and, barely alive, is in intensive care. Five days later, as Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, are having dinner, he slumps over, dead from cardiac arrest. Thus begins the Year of Magical Thinking. As a writer, Didion records her thoughts over the next year, and compiles them into this book. While this book could have easily been a self-pitying, depressive, and tear-jerking novel, it was exactly the opposite. It is an honest, simple, and up-lifting memoir about her memories of her husband, the experience of trying to protect her daughter from sickness and death, and the difference between mourning and grieving. Didions reflections about herself and her relationship with John can be extremely personal at times and distant at others, but she doesn’t hide the fact that she had fights and disagreements with John, nor does she hide the fact that they didn’t always see to eye to eye. What she always makes plain in her novel is the amount of love the two shared, how much she misses him, and how her life will never be the same.