![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() People were intrigued by Play It as It Lays, Didion’s second novel, which came out two years later (though it got some hostile reviews). Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, captures the essence of Didion: “People liked the collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (though it was not, at first, a big seller). Taken together, these two books, but especially Magical Thinking, consolidate Didion’s formidable reputation as one of the US’s greatest postwar exponents of first-person reportage. In Blue Nights, published six years later, Didion sets out to write Quintana’s elegy, but understandably and perhaps inevitably, can scarcely bring herself to face the task. Less than two years later, she died of acute pancreatitis at the age of 39, after a series of traumatic hospitalisations and just before the publication of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion’s bestselling book to date. During 2004, Quintana recovered, then collapsed again with bleeding in her brain. Indeed, Quintana was still unconscious in the intensive care unit of Beth Israel North hospital when her father died. Interpolated in the agony of this tale is the parallel drama of their daughter Quintana’s medical emergency, hospitalised in New York with a case of pneumonia that became septic shock. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”) Surgical in its exquisite precision, and finally serene, Didion’s memoir helps to purge her grief and to set her loss in the new context of widowhood. “Misery memoirs” are commonplace today – Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story (2011) is a typical example – but Didion’s contribution to the genre raised it to the status of literature, a point acknowledged by the playwright David Hare, who directed the author’s own version in a stage adaptation starring Vanessa Redgrave in 2007.Ĭold, clear, precise, and with her emotions mostly held in check through a web of words, Didion narrates a year that began when her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, collapsed from a fatal heart attack in the couple’s Upper East Side apartment on the evening of 30 December 2003. ![]() The result is a classic of mourning that’s also the apotheosis of baby-boomer reportage, a muted celebration of the enthralling self. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends Joan Didion about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.Life changes fast. 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. Summary: 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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