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.
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.”
Quotes and thoughts while reading:
Please note, we have location numbers again, as this was read on a kindle.
"The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room,
equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all
the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant reading of the same lines.
This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable,
if only for myself." (loc 70)
"The death of a parent, he wrote, "despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us
and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period that call mourning,
be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bead, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections." (loc 267)
" 1) What is the meaning of the poem and what is the experience? 2) What thought or reflection does the experience lead us to? 3) What mood,
feeling, emotion is stirred or created by the poem as a whole? " (loc 412)
"More than one day... the reference was to a line from a movie... "I love you more than even one more day"... John had whispered this every time
he left the ICU." (loc 694) Whew, this, like so many other parts of the book just suck the breath out of you.
On loc 1040 Didion talks about the book Intensive Care: A Doctor's Journal and how she read it when her daughter was in the ICU. Because
what else is a writer to do, but research, and learn. It's an approach I can appreciate and understand. She's grasping for something, anything to make
this situation understandable.
"I wrote, for the first time since John dies, a piece... It was the first piece I had written since 1963 that he did not read in draft form and tell me what was
wrong, what was needed, how to bring it up here, take it down there..." (loc 2146)
"I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. This day a year ago was December 21, 2003.
John did not see this day a year ago. John was dead." (loc 2257)
Goodness, this book feels so real, because it is. And Didion has left herself so vulnerable in the printing of it. I can only commend her for that, and thank her
for sharing, via her beautiful, purposeful writing, this experience. This book popped up twice in my life, in the hands of a friend, and a stranger across a room.
I'm glad I was present enough to notice it, and to let it float on my cerebral lake, bobbing up and down until I decided to reel it in and read it.
© JKloor 2015 Books