"It's always been pretty ritzy."īlue Nights is a disturbing book, though not for the obvious reasons. Was it bought in an era when the neighbourhood was more modest? Didion smiles.
#Image life after life book full#
The apartment – huge, airy, full of beautiful objets and gorgeous photos – is on one of the ritziest streets on the Upper East Side and reminds one she is as much a creature of Hollywood as of journalism. At 76, she looks both older than she is and oddly girlish in checked summer dress, small feet in tennis shoes – her style unchanged since she turned up at the Vogue offices in New York in her 20s with wet hair and similar footwear, knowing she wasn't cut out for a career at the fashion magazine. Six years later, on one of the hottest days of summer, she is in the same chair, as delicate as before and more animated, though on the subject of losing those she loved most, her voice drops below the level of the traffic outside.ĭidion is surprised, she says, by her reputation as indestructible a friend calls her "the stainless steel tulip", but this is not how she feels.
Four months after Quintana's death, on a snowy day in New York, I interviewed Didion in her apartment she was unmoving, so slight as to be almost translucent. Their daughter was in intensive care at the time, suffering from pneumonia and septic shock. The success of Magical Thinking derived partly from the tension between Didion's dispassionate writing style and the intimacy of what she was describing: her relationship with her husband, John, with whom she wrote screenplays, and how she withstood his sudden death from a heart attack as they sat down to dinner in their Manhattan apartment. Now she has written what might loosely be called a sequel, Blue Nights, about the awful confluence of the death, 18 months later, of her daughter, Quintana, at 39. Her last book, The Year Of Magical Thinking, captured in the most lucid prose the deranging effect of grief. It’s the perfect gift for literature fans, wizarding buffs, and lovers of all things fantastical.T he porter in Joan Didion's building refers to her as Mrs Dunne, a reminder, eight years after her husband's death, of their enduring image as unit. Bonus: Revealing behind-the-scenes photos, captured during filming, featuring the cast, crew, and mythical creatures, as well as a striking round-up of Potter book covers from editions around the world. In addition, readers get an insider’s look at the Fantastic Beasts film series, starring Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander, and at the Broadway and West End stage smash Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Glorious full-color photographs deliver all of the Hogwarts favorites, including Dumbledore, Hagrid, Severeus Snape, Professor McGonagall, and the baddie everyone loves to hate, Voldemort. This deluxe collector’s edition delves into how the worldwide best-selling books about a young wizard made the leap from page to screen, going in-depth on all eight of the blockbuster movies that launched the careers of Daniel Radcliffe (as Harry, aka the Boy Who Lived), Emma Watson (as Hermione Granger) and Rupert Grint (as Ron Weasley). On the 25th anniversary of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the novel that began an unparalleled and as-yet-unending fantasy phenomenon, LIFE celebrates the extraordinary world of Harry Potter.