LIVE from the NYPL: JOAN DIDION in conversation with Sloane Crosley

November 21, 2011

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"When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children." --Joan Didion, Blue Nights

Joan Didion dwells on mortality throughout her most recent memoir, Blue Nights, in which she tries to cope with, or at least understand, the loss of her daughter, Quintana Roo. Didion is well-known as a fiction author, playwright and, most notably, non-fiction essayist. She is widely considered one of the best American writers of the past fifty years. Now, Didion’s last two memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, have focused on the deaths of her husband and daughter—hesitantly allowing us a glimpse into her carefully edited makeshift diary. In Blue Nights, she scribes intensely detailed family moments and reflects on these, often to no significant realization except that they’re over.
 

This program is copresented with The Young Lions.

JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento, California and graduated with a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley. She has been a novelist, essayist and screenwriter for more than three decades. Her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published in 2005 and became a national bestseller, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the winner of a National Book Award. She lives in New York.

SLOANE CROSLEY is the best-selling author of two essay collections: I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number.  Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and Salon.com among many other publications. She is also a frequent contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered". She lives in New York.

 
LIVE from the NYPL is made possible with generous support from Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund.