The Year of Magical Thinking — Portable Edition

This is how Joan Didion begins her journey through the memory of the most transformative year of her life, starting on the night her husband, writer John Dunne, to whom she had been married for over 30 years, dies of a heart attack, and her only daughter is in a coma in the hospital. With writing that is as incisive as it is clear, as honest as it is disarming, Didion explores the living who survive the dead, revealing through her personal experience that which is universal to us all: the pain of loss, the need to persevere when everything seems futile.

At times journalistic, drawing on studies, experts, or poems and works of art, and at others confessional and literary, yet avoiding self-pity, Didion lets the flow of her consciousness travel through memories of marriage, and of motherhood and writing—recollections that emerge at every turn as she arranges her husband's funeral or visits her unconscious daughter in the hospital.