The Year of Magical Thinking is a true and bitter story about the experience of loss. Joan Didion describes how she lived for a year after the sudden death of her husband, with whom she had been together for forty years. She is tormented by one question: could she somehow influence what happened, could she recognize the signs that fate placed? Or were they not signs? She notices signs of magical thinking in herself and tries to deal with her consciousness, her perception, her memory.