Grief literature

After reading this and Dennis Lim's essay, I got curious about Joan Didion's new A Year of Magical Thinking, "a meticulous chronicle of a wretched spell that began on December 30, 2003, when her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a massive coronary in their Upper East Side apartment while their only child, Quintana Roo, lay unconscious in an ICU nearby, stricken with pneumonia that had quickly developed into septic shock."

Didion helpfully includes her husband's autopsy and daughter's CT scan.

Since Didion's prose is at its best rather steely, I doubt the results are as morbidly exploitative as it sounds.

I've circled Didion for years; the only recent book of hers I've finished is the essay collection Political Fictions (the home of the most unruffled, meticulous account of how the right-wing conspiracy created Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr and eventually impeached Bill Clinton I've read). A recent essay, "The Case of Theresa Schiavo," is also impressive. Miami remains a pungent read, a reminder of just how grisly living in South Florida was in the 1980's. Anybody read A Year of Magical Thinking yet?