We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. I can’t imagine dying without this book.”
“I can’t think of a book we need more than hers. An indelible portrait of loss and grief.” Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth.” An exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.ĭidion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters.
Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).ĭidion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
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. 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. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. 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. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. 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. From one of America’s iconic writers, 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.
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