“Quite simply, I was in love with New York. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”Ħ. “All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”Ĥ.
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”ģ. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”Ģ. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. To make your own work and take pride in it.
Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I would say more but I am too busy weeping like the sensitive literary nerd I am so let’s get to what you came here for: 20 absolutely gorgeous Joan Didion quotes. That was the first book of essays I had ever read. Then our professor passed out a fully photocopied version of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and my world shattered into stars. Older boys who played Rise Against! songs on their guitars at frat parties they were too old to go to and took ten pages to describe a woman’s tits called me a navel gazer and I felt completely out of my depth. Joan Didion was my only friend in the nonfiction graduate class I took as an undergrad. She died Thursday from complications of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 87. Among her work: the 1976 adaptation of “A Star is Born,” starring Barbara Streisand the 2005 National Book Award winning memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking ” and “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” a collection of essays written between the late 1960s and early 2000s which was released in 2021. She moved between genres as easily as between subjects, working as a novelist, screenwriter, political reporter, and essayist. For decades, Didion captured the changing political, social, and cultural landscapes of the country, in a voice both observant and personal. The overarching message - that death and grief are bound up in love and memory - inspires reflection on what matters most in life.America lost a literary icon today with the passing of acclaimed writer Joan Didion. The truthfulness with which Didion discusses some of life's most essential elements - death, love, memory, marriage, creative work - spurred deep conversations with my loved ones after they read it, bringing us closer together. She also describes editing things he'd written, laboring over the decision of whether to move a comma and change the meaning of a sentence or not. For example, Didion is reluctant to give away Dunne's shoes after his death because if he comes back, he will need them. Instead, she pens a love letter from a wild and lonely frontier, transporting us into the exceptional life she shared with Dunne, who she lived and worked alongside for 40 years.Įven the title hints at radical honesty being a throughline of the book: The "magical thinking" of loss. One of the things that makes this book so universal is Didion's concise and exact writing style - you won't find overly sentimental musings. Joan Didion as British playwright David Hare directs "The Year of Magical Thinking," which is Didion's account of living through the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, at the Booth Theater in New York, NY, Thursday, March 22, 2007.
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