The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support.
Just days later - the night before New Year's Eve - Joan and her husband were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. 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.
Just days later - the night before New Year's Eve - Joan and her husband were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. 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 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.”
Joan Didion, author of A Book of Common Prayer and many other fiction and non-fiction titles, and John Gregory Dunne, author of the novels Dutch Shea, Jr., and True Confessions as well as some non-fiction titles, were a well-matched, devoted couple. The year of “magical thinking” refers to her efforts to think away her grief and loss. It is well written and a gripping story of loss and coming to grips with that loss. I highly recommend it. Meg
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