The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion's memoir covers the year after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a fatal coronary as the couple sat down to dinner, ending a partnership of forty years. Days earlier their only daughter, Quintana, had fallen ill with what became septic shock, and she had not regained consciousness when her father died. Didion relives and reexamines his death through the following months while caring for Quintana through a second hospitalization. The title uses magical thinking in its anthropological sense, such as her reluctance to give away Dunne's shoes because he would need them when he returned. She writes with reportorial detachment and draws on medical and psychological research on grief. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Sam Harris included it among 12 books he says everyone should read, and food styling blogger Catalina Penciu called it a book she cannot forget.