Notes to John by Joan Didion
Reaching from beyond the grave, something she seemed capable of doing even while alive, Joan Didion retains a stony grip on readers’ imaginations. Posterity has been generous to her, much kinder than it has been to other literary luminaries such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and (to put it mildly) Alice Munro.
There was a considerable down payment of pain made to underwrite such posterity. The stunning one-two deaths of her husband, the novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, in 2003, and, 20 months later, of their troubled adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, plunged her deep into the loss column.
