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Joan Didion’s Blue Period

Perhaps our most incisive chronicler of the power and agonies of the family life, Joan Didion has also brought an unsparing eye to her own life and times. Her new memoir, Blue Nights (out today), examines the life and death of her daughter, Quintana. For Susan Cheever, writing in The Daily Beast, the book is “a tragic story that is compelling as a thriller.” And it almost didn’t see the light of day. Below, Didion in her own words:

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Read part of the Cheever interview in Word

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Photo: Blue Nights cover: Alfred Knopf