I Write to Find Out What I Am Thinking - (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) by Joan Didion (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This second 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.

In her essay "Why I Write" (included in this volume), Joan Didion explained what lies behind her iconic nonfiction writing: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." Across her long and prolific career, readers have been blessed time and again by her brilliance as a prose stylist and a social commentator.

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: bearing witness to our history, illuminating our culture, and shedding light on the human condition.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Review Quotes

"Didion is a brilliant observer, a powerful thinker, a writer whose work has been central to the times in which she has lived." --The Boston Globe

"We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward." -- Los Angeles Times

"[The Year of Magical Thinking] is a living, sharp, and memorable book. . . . An exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement . . . sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth." --The New York Times Book Review

"Didion has translated the sad hum of her thoughts into a profound meditation on mortality. The result aches with a wisdom that feels dreadfully earned." --The Economist

"For the great many of us who cherish Joan Didion, who can never get enough of her voice and her brilliant, fragile, endearing, pitiless persona, [Blue Nights] is a gift." --Newsday

"An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion's distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature." --National Book Foundation citation, Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

About the Author

JOAN DIDION (1934-2021) was born in Sacramento, California. She wrote five novels and ten nonfiction books, as well as co-authoring screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, for The Panic in Needle Park, Play It as It Lays, and A Star is Born, among others. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award.

About the Introducer: GRIFFIN DUNNE is an actor, film producer, and director. He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his role in After Hours. Films he has directed include Addicted to Love, Practical Magic, and Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, a documentary about his aunt.