The Year of Magical Thinking

I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking at a library book sale a few years back. It languished on my bookshelf until I started trying to actually read book I owned that I hadn't read.

TheNew Yorker writes:

Didion's husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, just after they had returned from the hospital where their only child, Quintana, was lying in a coma. This book is a memoir of Dunne's death, Quintana's illness, and Didion's efforts to make sense of a time when nothing made sense. "She's a pretty cool customer," one hospital worker says of her, and, certainly, coolness was always part of the addictive appeal of Didion's writing. The other part was the dark side of cool, the hyper-nervous awareness of the tendency of things to go bad. In 2004, Didion had her own disasters to deal with, and she did not, she feels, deal with them coolly, or even sanely. This book is about getting a grip and getting on; it's also a tribute to an extraordinary marriage. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

It really was a lovely book. She talked about the elements of grief when you think you're going crazy and you really aren't, your mind is just adjusting to a life without the one that died.
It was interesting to read about she and her husband, they're writers and seemingly well known. It was like a glimpse inside a social circle I only see exaggerated on Real Housewives of NYC.

I liked it, it was deep and heavy when I probably should have been reading light and airy, but it held my attention and her descriptions of the jolting awake moments at night were so poignant.