January/February 2006
National Book Award winner Joan Didion
to speak at UNC Feb. 28
CHAPEL HILL -- Joan Didion, author of the best-selling memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” will speak at UNC Feb. 28 at 7:30 p.m. in Memorial Hall. The book won the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction.
As the 2006 Morgan Writer-in-Residence, Didion will present a free public reading. Parking is available in some campus lots after 5 p.m. and in nearby commercial lots.
A keen observer of politics and culture, Didion is the author of nine books of nonfiction and five novels.
In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion examines the truth about intimacy, grief and denial during the year after her husband’s untimely death. The book begins: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Just weeks after her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, lapsed into a coma, Didion’s husband of nearly 40 years — author John Gregory Dunne — suffered a fatal heart attack in December 2003 at their dining room table. Dunne’s death propelled Didion into a state she calls “magical thinking.” Didion finished the book at the end of 2004, and it was published in October 2005 — just two months after her daughter and only child died at the age of 39.
The Washington Post calls Didion’s memoir “a work of surprising clarity and honesty,” and The New York Times named it one of the “10 Best Books of 2005.” Publishers Weekly describes the book as “an indispensable addition to Didion’s body of work and a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning literature.”
Didion’s other nonfiction books include “Where I Was From,” “Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11,” “Political Fictions,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “The White Album,” “Salvador,” “Miami” and “After Henry.” Her novels include “Run River,” “Play It as It Lays,” “A Book of Common Prayer,” “Democracy” and “The Last Thing He Wanted.”
Didion and Dunne together authored seven screenplays, including “Up Close and Personal” and the 1976 remake of “A Star is Born.” Didion’s essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and other major magazines.
Didion’s visit is sponsored by the English department in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program, established in 1993 by alumni Allen and Musette Morgan of Memphis, Tenn., to bring writers of distinction to the UNC campus.
Previous Morgan writers have included Shelby Foote, Annie Dillard, Beth Henley, Richard Ford, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Richard Wilbur, Russell Banks, John Edgar Wideman, Tobias Wolff, Calvin Trillin, Alice Walker and Robert Hass.
For more information on the Didion lecture, call (919) 962-4283 or visit english.unc.edu/morgan_lecture.html.
Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program contact: Susan Irons, 962-4238, Susan Irons@unc.edu
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Weaver Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: L.J. Toler,