Zusatztext Thrilling . . . a living! sharp! and memorable book. . . . An exact! candid! and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement . . . sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth. Robert Pinsky! The New York Times Book Review Stunning candor and piercing details. . . . An indelible portrait of loss and grief. Michiko Kakutani! The New York Times I can't think of a book we need more than hers. . . . I can't imagine dying without this book. John Leonard! New York Review of Books Achingly beautiful. . . . We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise! unrivaled eye for absurdity! and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is thus a difficult! moving! and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward. Gideon Lewis-Kraus! Los Angeles Times An act of consummate literary bravery! a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. . . . It also skips backward in time [to] call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage. . . . To make her grief real! Didion shows us what she has lost. Lev Grossman! Time Informationen zum Autor Joan Didion Klappentext 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.Chapter 1 1. Life changes fast.Life changes in the instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.The question of self-pity. Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (Notes on change.doc) reads May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m., but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.For a long time I wrote nothing else. Life changes in the instant.The ordinary instant. At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, the ordinary instant. I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word ordinary, because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. He was on his way home from workhappy, successful, healthyand then, gone, I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an ordinary Sunday morning it had been. It was just an ordinary beautiful September day, people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern ...

8220;Thrilling . . . a living, sharp, and memorable book. . . . An exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement . . . sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth.”

—Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review

“Stunning candor and piercing details. . . . An indelible portrait of loss and grief.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“I can’t think of a book we need more than hers. . . . I can’t imagine dying without this book.”
—John Leonard, New York Review of Books

“Achingly beautiful. . . . We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is thus a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward.”
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Los Angeles Times

“An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. . . . It also skips backward in time [to] call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage. . . . To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost.”
—Lev Grossman, Time

Auteur

Joan Didion

Texte du rabat

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.

Résumé
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that 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.

One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

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 about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1 1.*Life changes fast.Life changes in the instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.The question of self-pity.*Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.For a long time I wrote nothing else.*Life changes in the instant.The ordinary instant.*At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant.” I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word “ordinary,” because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevente…