Didion on Didion

If you missed last week's Joan Didion Q&A at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre and desperately need to hear a muffled, lo-fi recording full of maddening audio interference and generally poor sound quality, you are in luck. Discussing Blue Nights -- a companion piece to 2006's The Year of Magical Thinking -- Didion exhibited the fragility and fatigue that she writes about so eloquently in this unsettling new memoir. Where a lesser writer might pander to readers with false levity, Didion confronts the perils of aging (she turns 77 on December 5th) and death (her daughter Quintana died shortly before the publication of Magical Thinking) with unflinching honesty.

While it might have been nice to get a broader consideration of Didion's long career as a novelist (Play It as It Lays, Democracy), screenwriter (The Panic in Needle Park, True Confessions) and essayist (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album), moderator Margaret MacMillan (Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World) kept the focus on Didion's recent books and the life Didion lived while writing them. This made for an insightful, if muted, conversation. Thanks to the recording above, you can enjoy a heightened (which is to say more muffled) experience of Didion's halting replies. -- JD