Joan Didion and Sloane Crosley | 11-21-2011 | LIVE from the NYPL

LIVE from the NYPL | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Bartos Forum, November 21, 2011.

Joan Didion dwells on mortality throughout her most recent memoir, Blue Nights, in which she tries to cope with, or at least understand, the loss of her daughter, Quintana Roo. Didion is well-known as a fiction author, playwright and, most notably, non-fiction essayist. She is widely considered one of the best American writers of the past fifty years. Now, Didion’s last two memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, have focused on the deaths of her husband and daughter—hesitantly allowing us a glimpse into her carefully edited makeshift diary. In Blue Nights, she scribes intensely detailed family moments and reflects on these, often to no significant realization except that they’re over.