How badly we as a society deal with death is most poignantly outlined in Joan Didion’s memoir recalling the year following the sudden death of her much loved husband. How little we acknowledge the tearing grief, the “magical thinking” that will conjure a loved-one’s return, the depression and the sense of the deepest loss that the bereaved must cope with. The sparseness of the writing, the unflinching analysis of her state of mind is a moving testament to her life with John Gregory Dunne.
Like for Like Reading:
After You: Letters of Love, and Loss, to a Husband and Father, Natascha McElhone
A "Piece of Passion" from the publisher...
On the evening of 30 December 2003, Joan Didion and her husband John Gregrory Dunne were talking over supper when he slumped in his chair, dying so suddenly that his wife mistook the event for a joke. In the months that followed there was no order or plan or structure to this extraordinary book beyond the author typing whatever came into her mind. This was not a book Joan Didion ever intended to write and as a result what we have is a true and profound description of grief – but more importantly a life-affirming testament to the enduring quality of the human spirit. The reader is elevated by Didion’s book: we will all at some stage experience loss of this kind and we can survive.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
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