The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner (Vintage International)

Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage and a life in good times and bad. Several days before Christmas 2003, Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was placed in an induced coma on life support. Days later, the night before New Year's Eve, John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary while the couple was sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital. In a second, their forty-year partnership ended. Four weeks later, their daughter recovered. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the weeks and months that disrupted her understanding of death, illness, marriage, children, memory, sanity, and life itself.