Joan Didion has always seen the dark side of life. Her acerbic fatalism has been her literary signature for more than four decades. As the foremost survivor of “a peculiar and inward time,” as she so memorably described the 1960s in The White Album, she has been the voice of those observers who have watched America transform itself into something neither she, nor her classmates in the Berkeley of the 1950s, could have ever imagined. She, more than any other writer of her generation, has painstakingly examined the fragmentation of modern American life. Yet despite her darkly ironic views, her personal life seems to have been, until the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, relatively happy. Yet the darkness always lurked, Didion's book seems to say, and the events described seem almost inevitable. That her husband's sudden death, the event and its aftermath chronicled in The Year of Magical Thinking, should have coincided with the illness and death, shortly before its publication, of their daughter, Quintana Roo, is the sort of fatal coupling that might have come from one of Didion's own novels.

The trademark pessimism, obvious to even the casual reader of Didion's work, takes an intensely personal turn in The Year of Magical Thinking, with Dunne's death revealing her own need to make sense of the meaning of their life together, and of her life alone. That Didion has turned this most painful and personal of events into a lens with which we may examine our own lives and deaths is characteristic of her art.

“Going to the literature” of grief and bereavement, Didion comments that “the power of grief to derange the mind has been exhaustively noted” (p. 34), and she has painstakingly detailed her own descent into a kind of “magical thinking” which comes alarmingly close to madness. And yet this is what grief is, she tells us, the unwillingness to accept the finality of loss: “On most surface levels I seemed rational. To the average observer I would have appeared to fully understand that death was irreversible … Yet my thinking on this point remained suspiciously fluid” (42–43).

Rituals replace reality as Didion does all the required things, things which “still didn't bring him back” (43). Her raw honesty and unflinching gaze on the subject of her own grief reveal a wisdom which her earlier writings have always suggested. Didion writes of a journey which we all have to take, and this book will, as she modestly said in an interview after its publication, “help one or two people.”