Before Christmas 2003, writers John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their daughter fall ill with septic shock. Some days later, Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, their close, symbiotic partnership was over. The 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.".