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“... wedding anniversary. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it: Seven years ago today we took the leis from ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John GregoryDunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail ...”

“... There came a time in the middle and late 1970s when Dominick Dunne knew he was washed up. For most of his life he had been trying to get into Hollywood by acting as more than he was. Or without pausing to ask what he was. As a stage manager for NBC TV he’d been picked to work on their 1952 production of The Petrified Forest – with Humphrey Bogart repeating his classic 1936 role, Henry Fonda doing Leslie Howard, and Lauren Bacall as Bette Davis ...”

“... between being a memory and being only a memory. On 30 December 2003, Joan Didion and her husband, John GregoryDunne, sat down to dinner in their apartment in New York. They had been married for forty years. They had had their fights, they had thought about divorce, but there they were. ‘Marriage is memory,’ Didion ...”

“... some dignity and is used to structure an already excellent fiction. Silence among the Weapons, John Arden’s first novel, deals with the mysterious and violent contortions which led up to the disintegration of the Roman Republic in the first century BC. The leading characters are Marius, Sulla, Cinna, Drusus and Mithridates Eupator, except that they ...”

“... was there.’The Centre Will Not Hold, the new Netflix documentary directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, lacks the three-in-the-morning question. It begins with a bridge and a blur, close-ups of bare feet and fresh typewriter ink. A rat crawls over a hippie, to show that in the Swinging Sixties, anything can happen. When Didion herself appears, her mouth is ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John GregoryDunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... effortlessly down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn told John GregoryDunne, who wrote about the case in 1997. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and restraining orders.’ He was talking about husbands and lovers whose fathers and grandfathers had appeared before him ...”

“... rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After Toland, the figure that mattered most to him, historically at least, was Wolfe Tone. The rising of the United Irishmen in 1798 has long been important for republicans ...”