Review
From the book jacket: 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. 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...
Beyond the Book
Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California in 1934, and graduated
from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956. She is the author of five
novels and eight books of non-fiction. Her 1968 collection of essays,
Slouching Toward Bethlehem and her book,
The White Album (1979), made
her famous as an observer of American politics and culture with a distinctive
style that mixed personal reflection with social analysis. In 2001 she published
Political Fictions which targeted political conservatives with pieces
aimed at Newt Gingrich and the Religious Right. This was a radical shift from
her earlier writing which had ridiculed various aspects of liberalism. She
attributed her shift in opinion to the Republican Party's own shift away from...
