Joan Didion Survives 'The Year of Magical Thinking'

Enlarge image i

Author Joan Didion in her Upper East Side New York apartment in January 2003. Didion has written novels, non-fiction and essays. She is a contributor to the 'New York Review of Books.'

Neville Elder/Corbis

Author Joan Didion in her Upper East Side New York apartment in January 2003. Didion has written novels, non-fiction and essays. She is a contributor to the 'New York Review of Books.'

Neville Elder/Corbis

Enlarge image i

Writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne in 2000. 'We were each the person the other trusted,' writes Didion of Dunne.

Richard Schulman/Corbis

Writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne in 2000. 'We were each the person the other trusted,' writes Didion of Dunne.

Richard Schulman/Corbis

Just weeks after her daughter Quintana lapsed into a coma, Joan Didion's husband of nearly 40 years — novelist John Gregory Dunne — suffered a fatal heart attack at their dining room table. Didion's book about their lives together and her life now is called The Year of Magical Thinking. She tells Susan Stamberg how she adjusted to the loss of her husband in 2003 and her daughter two years later.

Didion, the author of five novels and seven books of non-fiction, is also a prolific essayist. She made an early mark with her 1968 collection of essays Slouching Toward Bethlehem. The book, in part, was a personal snapshot of her native California at a time of tremendous change.

The author and her Connecticut-born husband were really New Yorkers at heart. They lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

John Gregory Dunne was also a respected author of books and essays. His novel True Confessions, a murder mystery set in Southern California, was eventually made into a 1981 movie. Dunne helped adapt the book for film and used his experience with Hollywood to write two non-fiction books about the movie business, The Studio and Monster.