This is a book club episode. In it, Travis and Amanda will discuss and analyze the first half of The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. You should expect full “spoilers,” discussions of rhetorical elements, and celebrations / critiques of style and substance.
From the cover: “Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary…This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the ‘weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.’”