E Ellis Allen (girlonstilts.com)

Check out this Book Bite! A truly delicious Main Course!

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

In 2003, Joan Didion had been married to her husband, writer, John Gregory Dunne for nearly forty years. They had just returned from visiting their daughter, Quintana’s hospital bed. Quintana was sick and in a coma. Whether she would live or die was up in the air.

Joan and John go home. Joan is in the kitchen making dinner. John is in the other room and is suddenly silent. John suffers a fatal heart attack. Joan spends the next year and the recovery and then the second hospitalization of Quintana, in a state of dreaming, reliving her live with John and discovering what a life without him will mean.

Beautiful and haunting, Didion writes raw emotion like a master painting welding a paintbrush. This book is a magnificent look into Didion as she seeks poignant answers to what it means to have her husband die and what it means to survive it.