Talking Volumes: Joan Didion

With her all-seeing eye and clear, impelling, and quietly humorous prose, Joan Didion helped shape the golden age of literary journalism in the sixties and seventies. In particular, her book of California essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was a landmark work that confirmed for the rest of the country that strange folks indeed populate that state. Since then, Didion has written numerous investigative pieces, essays on personalities and politics, novels, and memoirs. Her latest, The Year of Magical Thinking, chronicles the year after the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and the grave illnesses of Quintana Roo, their only child (who died in August). As a writer, Didion is known as the ultimate cool customer, and while she maintains that clinical reserve in this book, the palpable struggle to keep herself together is devastating and compelling. And so the main question here is: How does one of literature’s most esteemed figures conduct a book tour in the wake of her most recent loss? 651-290-1221; www.fitzgeraldtheater.org