The Magical Thinking of Joan Didion’s Estate Sale

On the evening of December 30, 2003, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, decided to stay in. Didion made a fire—a habit from their years in California, where, late in the day, the coastal fog creeps landward—and then dinner. They ate in the living room, as they usually did when it was just the two of them, at a small table set near the fireplace. They were discussing the scotch that Dunne was drinking, maybe, or World War I; Didion couldn’t quite remember. What she did , though, is what happened after Dunne, in the middle of the meal, collapsed: the silence, the panic, the paramedics, the defibrillator, the doctor, the priest. The fact that, as they had their dinner that night, “John was talking,