Five Week Book Club (All Losses)

All meetings are online through video conferencing with options for video or just phone (audio). Instructions and online link will be shared by facilitator upon registering for the groups/workshops. This is an opportunity for you to connect with others who have similar experiences. You do not need to attend all sessions, drop in group.

An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. 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. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. 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”. The book The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is required reading for this group and can be purchased online.