The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Knopf, 227 pages, $23.95)

“Milk it, but no excessive melodramatics,” John Gregory Dunne tells us he wrote to himself in 1987, shortly after his doctors declared him a candidate for a “catastrophic cardiac event.” In his 1989 memoir, Harp, he reports that he also drafted a note about procedures that were to be followed should he suddenly die. Calvin Trillin was to deliver the news to Dunne's only child, Quintana Roo. “[I]t was,” Dunne wrote, “as if my wife, whom I jauntily called ‘the little widow,' could not manage on her own.”