The Year of Magical Thinking will star Seana McKenna. (Belfry Theatre) 

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is coming to Victoria in a production this November to star Seana McKenna, one of Canada's finest actors.

It is the first production in Canada of the solo show, which chronicles one woman's journey through grief.

McKenna will play Didion, in a role made famous by Vanessa Redgrave.

Didion, one of the U.S. most respected essayists and writers, wrote the memoir in 2004, after her daughter Quintana fell into a coma and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, dropped dead of a heart attack.

It is a moving account of the following year, which Didion said "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."

McKenna, who recently starred in Doubt in Toronto and Medea in Toronto and Winnipeg, won a Jessie Richardson Award for her performance in Wit in Vancouver and is a three-time Dora award winner for performances in Toronto.

She is also a veteran of the Stratford stage, where she played Phèdre this year.

The Year of Magical Thinking won a National Book Award for nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Didion adapted her book for stage, and Redgrave played in the one-woman show in London and on Broadway.

It will be produced at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria from Nov. 10 to Dec. 13. Belfry is looking at co-producing the show in other Canadian venues in 2010.