Last October, the New York Review of Books published a long article by Joan Didion that surveyed 16 books offering various degrees of insights into the Vice Presidency of *** Cheney. It was great to see Didion back in the pages of NYRB wrestling with a long unwieldy topic that was not quite so personal. Joan Didion's marriage to John Gregory Dunne was the stuff of literary legend. They spent nearly all their time with each other, they edited each other's books and articles, and they collaborated on movie scripts. On December 30, 2003, almost 40 years after they had been married and 15 years after John Gregory Dunne had been diagnosed with a heart condition his cardiologist charmingly referred to as the "widow-maker," he collapsed at the dining room table, dead of a heart attack. Didion didn't write anything for 9 months after her husband's death, and when she started writing again in October 2004, it became a marvelous little memoir entitled The Year of Magical Thinking published a year
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