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Joan Didion: Memoirs & Later Writings

Edited by David L. Ulin

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Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News Hollywood book lovers give starry support to LOA’s first Joan Didion volume
December 18, 2020

Buy all three Didion volumes in a boxed set and save $35.

Completing the definitive, three-volume Library of America edition of one of the most electrifying writers of our time, here are the achingly beautiful memoirs of loss and the masterful collections of reporting that crowned Joan Didion’s career.

In the essays of Political Fictions (2001), Didion casts a cool, wry, bracingly critical eye over late twentieth-century American democracy. Joining the working press on campaign planes and convention floors, she finds that the sound bites and photo ops that make up so much of modern political journalism not only fail to inform the public but actively alienate the very voters a free press is meant to serve. Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11 (2003), brought back into print here, continues Didion’s focus on “political fictions,” this time the self-justifying narratives that emerged in the wake of the September 11 attacks. With courage and startling prescience, she strikes a bold note of dissent.

Didion revisits her native California in Where I Was From (2003), a wide-ranging reconsideration of a state she thought she knew. Alongside incisive reporting on present-day water wars, suburban malls, sexual predators, mass incarceration, and the hollowing-out of the middle class are backward glances: at the ways in which explorers, painters, and novelists saw and imagined the state, and at the still-powerful myth of the self-reliant pioneer.

A winner of the National Book Award, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) is an intensely personal memoir of loss that has touched millions of readers. Beset by the twin tragedies of the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the terminal illness of her daughter, Quintana, Didion faces an abyss of grief that “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” Her lauded 2007 adaptation for the stage, which captures the memoir’s essence in an unforgettable dramatic monologue, is also included.

Blue Nights (2011), a memoir about Quintana’s death at thirty-nine, extends and deepens Didion’s meditations on life, bereavement, and inconsolable loss, as she reflects on the joys and anxieties of motherhood and searches for consolation in the recollection of good times and lives well lived.

South and West (2017) presents two extended sections from Didion’s unpublished notebooks of the 1970s. “Notes on the South” records her impressions from a road trip through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama against the backdrop of civil rights and antiwar protests. In “California Notes”—originally written while she was covering the trial of Patty Hearst—she plumbs the increasing strangeness of her home state.

David L. Ulin, editor, is the books editor of Alta and former book editor of the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time, and most recently the novel Thirteen Question Method. For Library of America he has also edited Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by the Fran & Ray Stark Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Political Fictions
A Foreword
Insider Baseball
The West Wing of Oz
Eyes on the Prize
Newt Gingrich, Superstar
Political Pornography
Clinton Agonistes
Vichy Washington
God’s Country

Fixed Ideas

Where I Was From

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play

Blue Nights

South and West
Notes on the South
California Notes

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-787-1 851 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 386 Library of America Series

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