Book Information
- Publisher
- Knopf
- Published
- 2005-10-04
- Pages
- 240 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 2.54 x 20.73 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781400043149
- ISBN-10
- 140004314X
- Price
- 4682 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Biographies & Memoirs/Specific Groups/Women
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A landmark work about grief, love, and survival from one of America’s most iconic writers One of The New York Times ’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Guardian ’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Joan Didion delivers a searing portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband or wife or child. In a work of electric honesty and passion, Didion explores how we all, somehow, will ourselves to survive. “An utterly shattering portrait of loss and grief.” –The New York Times S everal days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana Roo, fall ill with septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later, the Dunnes were sitting down to dinner after visiting their daughter in the hospital when John suffered a fatal heart attack. In that one moment, their partnership of forty years came to an end. This powerful narrative 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.” “Didion has transformed grief into literature.” —The Guardian
JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue , which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River , in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem , was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album , was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021.
Reviews
-
Like the repetition of days, of meals taken, of drinks enjoyed over and over, Didion returns to a few ghostly lines, taken from Phillipe Aries' The Hour of Our Death to remind the reader you too. You too believe in the repetition of your daily rituals with your loved ones that you are exempt from the finger of the Reaper. You too, as I did, Didion seems to say, refuse to acknowledge the passing of time, the leaving of life in every day details: the way we hold a fork, our eyes absorbing the exact slant of afternoon light, the sight of our beloved's living breathing face. Along with this more subtle message, Didion shares a deep insight: grief is not the same as mourning. In her experience grief settled in the shattered moments following the heart attack that took her writing partner, husband and best friend within seconds. That grief, as she reports it, numbed and in a sense preserved her until she might open to the less merciful mourning, in which the daily truth of the loss, its depth and height, its width across her now empty heart expanded. No one serves language like Didion. Alone in her vast talent now, with Dunne her husband gone, still she shines the way for the rest of us, writers, people, humans who share the only truth: we too will die someday.
-
Livro tocante e muito bem escrito.
-
Great book to read. Enjoyed reading it
-
If you've lost a long-time partner, this book may be a real comfort for you and make you feel deeply understood. I loved it when I got it after the death of my partner, and recently bought a copy for a dear friend who lost her husband. Like any book, it's probably not for everyone, but I found Joan Didion's writing amazing and even went on to read her other books.
-
Un libro muy interesante y una historia preciosa, aunque muy trágica
Related Literary Awards
- National Book Award Edition 65 (2007) ・Achievement Award