Just when I've sworn off any more loss memoirs (after overindulging all fall)...but it's Joan Didion so this is going on the Christmas wishlist.

ETA: No longer on the wishlist as I devoured it in two sittings. No one is more readable to me than Didion, even here where she is more...more what? More elusive, more indulgent? No. More poetic? Maybe.

I wouldn't recommend this as an introduction to Didion; I imagine it would be a frustrating read. So much is going on here---it is not a memoir, or a book about grief, but a meditation on loss, I suppose.

I decided not to wait after seeing this interview:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/inter...

I link to it here because I think it helped me enjoy the book, because Rose asks some of the questions that would have plagued me if I hadn't seen it, and because Didion is forced to say some things directly here that she said more eloquently but less directly in the book.

Favorite passages:" I find more faded and cracked photographs than I want ever again to see.I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married. I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember.
In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.
In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.
How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.


Want to reread Domination of Black by Stevens and New Hampshire by Eliot