The Gloaming

 I finished reading Blue Nights by Joan Didion.   It is the last book she wrote, and the first one of hers I've read.   Before that, last week, I read Notes to John.   This one came out posthumously and is not really a book -- it's her notes on her meetings with her psychiatrist.   Both the works were mostly about her adopted daughter Quintana -- her troubled life and early death, their relationship.  

The book I meant to read was The Year of Magical Thinking, which fits somewhere between the other two chronologically.     It was written after her husband died abruptly while Quintana was in the hospital fighting pneumonia.  

The reason I looked for that book -- it was already checked out at the library -- was that it was mentioned in Communion, by JD Vance, which I read the week before.    He mentioned that his wife Usha had read it, so he read it because of that.    

He also wrote how their discussion about death, sparked by Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," highlighted their different views on the afterlife — she was worried by it and he wasn't, even in his atheist years.

"Usha, like Didion, dreaded neither the 'loss of heaven' nor 'the pains of hell' for the most logical of reasons: She simply didn't think they existed. I came to believe in both, but I still didn't find either particularly motivating," he wrote.

More on Blue Nights here.