The Year of Magical Thinking March 16, 2007

What happens when your universe becomes unmoored? 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' Joan Didion's award-winning autobiographical examination of grief, re-lives the unimaginable night when, as Didion's only child lay in a coma, her husband of 40 years, writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a massive coronary as they sat down to dinner in their New York apartment. In response, Didion found a safe harbor in "magical thinking," stunned that "life changes in the instant" and feeling an irrational certainty that her husband "will come back and need his shoes." Her story is both a love letter to her daughter, who died just before the book was published in 2005, and a tribute to an extraordinary marriage.