![]() To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost. It also skips backward in time call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage. “An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. It is thus a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward.” We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. 34Psychological studies of magical thinking are distinguished by the underlying assumption that the healthy personality explains events and phenomena, not by. 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. 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 … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. 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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