Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club

Let the adventure begin. Join the Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club led by Sean R. Corbin, a PSPL Librarian.

The group meets the 3rd Thursday of the month from 2 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. (September through May) in the Cornelia White Community Room at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library in downtown Palm Springs.

To receive meeting information and/or join the email list for the Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club, please email Sean R. Corbin in advance of the meeting.

Most titles are available as Downloadable Audiobooks and/or eBooks from PSPL.

December 18, 2025

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

—2005 National Book Award Winner for Nonfiction

— From one of America’s iconic writers and the author of Notes to John, comes a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. 

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