Lary Bloom
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Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Joan Didion and the Dunnes
It has been some time since anything in the New York Times magazine created the kind of buzz that Joan Didion's cover story did on September 25. By Sunday evening, writers across America were calling or emailing other writers and saying "Don't miss this." Didion, whose nonfiction work has been highly praised and treasured particularly in the way it develops a sense of place, wrote honestly and with great particularity about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Much of the piece centered on the night that he died, and the detail is breathtaking. As I often say to my memoir students, there is no difference in form between memoir and novel. If you read Didion's piece, you can see clearly the sense of being in the moment, and the rich descriptions, leading to a climax. I was particularly impressed by the way Didion described the emptiness that occurs after loss, and the inability to do the simplest tasks. These are feelings that I felt after my wife Liz died in 2003 -- couldn't even pay a bill.I couldn't help but think, too, of John Gregory Dunne's brother, Dominick, whom Didion refers to as "Nick" in her piece. That's how he's known to friends in Hadlyme, where he lives in Connecticut. I saw him at a farmer's market in Old Lyme not long ago. It was just after he wrote in Vanity Fair that the locals wanted him to pose nude for a charity calender. He declined, arguing that a photogenic body was not among the gifts nature had provided him.
Posted by:Lary Bloom at 5:06 AM
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