Joan Didion’s poignant memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, is an account of her experience dealing with grief during the first year following the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. John and Joan had been married nearly 40 years when he suffered a fatal heart attack one evening in their New York apartment. To make a tragic event more complicated, the couple had just returned home from a visit to the hospital where their only daughter was comatose after a struggle with pneumonia. Thus, the surreal experience of dealing with bereavement was compounded for Didion by worries about her daughter’s health, and the necessity of informing her of John’s passing when she eventually regained consciousness.

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