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In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion contemplated how the rituals of everyday life were fundamentally altered after her husband died suddenly in 2003. The book was published in 2005, just months after Didion’s only child, her daughter Quintana Roo, died at age 39.
Didion pieces together her memories of her daughter’s life and death in her new book Blue Nights. She tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that she was unable to start mourning her daughter’s death until she started writing again.
