Click play to listen. Recorded on November 12, 2005.
Chicago journalist Mara Tapp interviews Joan Didion following the publication of Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). That book recounts the sudden death of Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the life-threatening illness and hospitalization of her daughter.
This interview provides an honest account of a year that turned Didion's notions of life, death, and home upside down, letting us glance at her life as she struggled to come to terms with her loss. Writing, she says, allowed her salvation from the traps of grief: It helped her to finally accept her husband’s death.
Program generously sponsored by the McCormick Tribune Foundation.
Above: Photograph by Edouardo.
