Joan Didion

"From the universally acclaimed, best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: ten pieces never before collected that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the "Points West" Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers; a session with Gamblers Anonymous;...

Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack.This powerful and moving work 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...

Two excerpts from never-before-seen notebooks offer insights into the author's literary mind and process and includes notes on her Sacramento upbringing, her life in the Gulf states, her views on prominent locals and her experiences during a formative "Rolling Stone" assignment. "Joan Didion has always kept notebooks of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays, and copies of articles. "Notes on the South" traces a road trip...

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