The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion’s memoir is an account of the year that followed the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003. Days before he died, their daughter, Quintana, had been admitted to hospital in New York with pneumonia that developed into septic shock; she was still unconscious when her father died, and was hospitalised again the following year. The book follows Didion as she relives and re-examines her husband’s death while caring for her daughter. It has been widely regarded as a classic book about mourning.