From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion 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.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall … Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. 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. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. 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.
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.”
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I found the beginning to be … non-coherent (for a general reader) in its attempt to express the widows feelings. As I continued to read, I realized it was because it was a true expression of her detachment from her ability to communicate in her grief. The more you read, the more you realize that this sweet woman actually did write this whilst …
Difficult book to read. 8 women in our book club all had difficulty. Many did not finish reading it. It was not a page Turner, most the time we didn’t want to pick it up.
I understood why it was written this way. It still had unnecessary information filling up the pages.
An insightful, emotionally rich, and heart-wrenching memoir about grief and loss.
Beautifully written memoir of the death of her husband and the year which followed, including the illness and eventual death of her only child.
Well written journey of the first year following a spouse’s death. I could not put it down as I relived the death of my dad and watched as my mother travelled this road. Helpful or anyone who has ever lost a loved one.