The author copes with the death of her husband and the grief that ensues with ultra introspection. It's a staged process and we are privy to a lot of details while she gives us a glimpse of her life with her husband (John Gregory Dunne, also an author), a relationship to be admired for certain. The prose is clearly well constructed though often I did not really get the learned quotations (poetry, in another life maybe). An interesting technique was the form of pseudo dialogue she has with herself, and shares with us, she inserts pieces here and there and they are repeated to amplify her ideas, it's quite unconventional but it can also get repetitious

What was maybe more interesting than her husband 's death (preordained to a degree, he died of a cardiac arrest) and her daughter Quitana's brush with death (she was adopted, she suffered a serious flu that turned to peneumonia and would eventually require brain surgery, etc) might be the immersion into her life that is filled with places and people. You know the way she talks about her travels (Bogota, Paris, California, New York) that she and her husband rubbed shoulders with important people. She never flaunts about money and even alludes to financial hardship, maybe all the friends she names by full name (as if we were supposed to know them, and I'm sure some of them are famous people actually) are really hers and anyone's real wealth

I'll admit, some of the deeper medical and psychiatric research she talks about are hard to digest

The whole time on the novel, I was thinking the reading could be greatly augmented by Google for further footnote stuff, map/restaurant lookup (where is Orso in LA?), word definition, obscure reference (terra cognita). It's amazing how useful it (and the web) has become, and sad how dependent of it I am

In chapter 16, Didion talks about a file her husband edited on a computer, one of the last thing he did before he did. She laments about not being able to know what he added (or removed) in the document. In the future, software could track these things better. Writely, an online word processor, already does that by keeping track of multiple versions automatically

227 pages (font type larger than usual, 14pt?) make this a short read but it also helps that it is written very well. I found the book design very elegant, easy on the eyes. There was a note on the typeface used: Bodoni. This is the 2nd book where I've seen a blurb about the font used, the first one being Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

I finished this in two nights which if nothing indicates it is a captivating account of the year that followed the author's husband's passing

Didion won the National Book Award (non-fiction) for this book, it was pretty good considering the hype


May 2007
Didion adapts her work for the theater with Vanessa Redgrave as the lead [NY Times], and here's a review of the show