The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

 As with so many writers, I've not read Didion before. No idea whether this is a good place to start as a whole, but it's certainly a good book. It's the story of her husband's death, and her daughter's life-threatening illness, which both happened in late 2003. What marks it out is a toughly enquiring tone, coupled with an honest self-appraisal. Her daughter Quintana was going through a coma-like hospitalisation at the time of her husband John Gregory Dunne's death. They were starting on dinner in the midst of the long vigil going back and forth to her bedside in a New York hospital when Dunne collapsed and died from a massive heart attack. Didion admits that she was not in the mental space where this could happen; in other words was subject to shock, despite the fact that he had been told often enough by doctors of the occlusion he had being nicknamed "the widowmaker". She looks back afterwards and sees what may have been signs, but at the time of the death is utterly sideswiped. This, with the ongoing situation with Quintana, brings on an array of reactions and interpretations as the weeks go by, all swirled by shock, but also all marked with her distinctive "cool customer" attempts at toughness, and her honest subsequent reflections on vulnerabilities and delusive paths of thought. Her analytical mind, which seems a, if not the, prominent element of her personality, is relentless, even when it's encountering her own unwillingness or inability to reach a bulwark of understanding. She has a journalist's almost kneejerk reaction about going to the literature, and includes excerpts of things she was reading which shed sometimes temporary, sometimes profound, light on her understanding of the experience, from articles in medical journals, to what might be called superior self-help books. She also revisits their family life and social life, where particular details seem to provide explanations of the undercurrents of where she's got to now. The prose is punchy and direct, whilst retaining emotional strength, which makes it engrossing. Its honesty also tells the story she probably wasn't thinking of, where we get to see her privilege and assumptions. One thing it doesn't tell is the deeper story of Quintana: a bit of very quick internet research reveals her alcoholism, which is not mentioned here at all. The next book I have by Didion is called Blue Nights, and is about Quintana's death in 2005, so I wonder whether she will feel able to engage with that fact at that point. We'll see.