Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is, in a sense, the biography of the author’s own grief. These memoirs carefully chronicle her experiences following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The husband and wife had returned from visiting their only child, Quintana, at the Intensive Care Unit of a New York Hospital, where she lay in a coma. As the author was preparing dinner, a sudden silence in the midst of their conversation drew her attention, and she looked up to see her husband slumped over the table. “Life changes in an instant,” Didion writes. John had suffered a massive heart attack, and her fellow writer, best friend, and husband of forty years, was gone.

The book is a catalogue of the following year: the things that conjure up memories, the pieces of news or half-made plans that highlight the absence of someone “to agree, disagree, talk back.” Didion was additionally coping with her daughter’s illness, who relapses after a brief period of better health. The author plunged herself into the task of learning everything about Quintana’s malady, but we can tell that this additional test only intensified, rather than served as a distraction for, the original loss. The absence of her husband, palpable at every second of the day, propelled her into a state of “magical thinking,” the inspiration for the title. “We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss,” she writes. “We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

But I call it the ‘biography of grief’ with acknowledgement of the “cool”-ness with which Didion surveys her experiences. One hospital worker unwittingly echoes the author’s self-analysis, saying, “She’s a pretty cool customer.” And her book is not sentimental; it does not offer the normal platitudes associated with death; it simply offers an unflinching, clear-eyed view of her daily life. She writes from the moment, neither allowing herself disassociation nor melodrama. The book’s discipline is at once comforting and heartbreaking, and the memoir is destined to become a go-to book for anyone coping with recent loss, when sympathy, and not disassociated advice, is truly what we need.

Read a review at the Chicago Sun Times; for an insightful and alternate view, visit 2 Things @ Once.