One of our misconceptions about grief, Joan Didion writes, is that a "certain forward movement will prevail." Once we stagger through the first few weeks and withstand the funeral, the healing process inevitably will begin.

Not so, Didion learned after the sudden death, on Dec. 30, 2003, of her longtime husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. Far from easing, the loss worsens, sucking the bereaved into crazed vortexes of memory, self-pity, meaninglessness.

"The Year of Magical Thinking," a book both beautiful to read and terrible to absorb, follows this rabbit hole through a year of overlapping, intense reflections. Here, time moves in all directions. The rawness of an old woman struggling to come to grips with a changed world chafes against the casual glamour of dinners at restaurants like Morton's and Ernie's — vignettes that play more like parallel experiences than decades-old memories.

The book is as much a love letter to Dunne and their daughter, Quintana, as it is a portrait of grief. When her husband dies, Didion dissects her ordinary reactions — numbness, anger, guilt, self-pity — in her extraordinarily precise and cutting manner.

"Why make this call and not just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes," she writes describing her anger and "primitive dread" over a roundabout request she received about donating her husband's organs. In her "magical thinking," Dunne's death is no fixed point.

"How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?"

Didion, 70, has spent her life chronicling contemporary society in fierce, crystalline prose. From essays on celebrities and her native California to novels such as "Play It as It Lays" and "A Book of Common Prayer," she has been American literature's "cool customer" — a label bestowed by a social worker at New York-Presbyterian Hospital the evening of her husband's heart attack. Later that night, she "wondered what an uncool customer would be allowed to do. Break down? Require sedation? Scream?"

On paper, the always elegant Didion does none of these things, even when reeling from the second blow of her only child's severe and lengthy illness. Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, 39, died in August. Her death goes unaddressed by Didion's book, which ends a year after Dunne's death. But knowledge of it renders almost unreadable certain passages concerning mother and daughter.

When Quintana was little, she described fear and death as the "Broken Man," telling her parents, "I'll hang onto the fence and won't let him take me."

But, of course, we all let go when the Broken Man comes for us. It is those left behind who must hang on, through the year of magical thinking and beyond.