This hardcover omnibus edition of Didion's collected nonfiction contains her final four books: Blue Nights, South and West, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and her bestselling and most famous work, The Year of Magical Thinking.
American essayist and novelist Joan Didion made her debut as one of the 'New Journalists' of the Sixties, and ever since then readers have been bowled over by her brilliance as a prose stylist and acuteness as a social commentator. She notched up many honours, including a National Book Award, the PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, and a National Medal of Arts and Humanities. By the time of her death in 2021 she had achieved the status of a national treasure.
In her essay “Why I Write” (included in this volume), Joan Didion explained what lies behind her iconic nonfiction work: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” This volume contains her last four books, published between 2005 and 2021. From her unforgettable reckonings with grief (for her husband in The Year of Magical Thinking and for her daughter in Blue Nights), to her exploration of two iconic regions of America in South and West, through the indelible pieces of reporting collected from across her career in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the books collected here show Didion at her best. Here is the sceptical observer coolly analysing American culture, fearlessly calling out the American media, humorously recounting her own early experiences as a journalist, and finally, devastatingly, focusing her interrogatory skills on her own grief. 'When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.'
