This book is Didion's account of the year following her husband's death, but it's really about the many years of the life they lived together. Writing in real-time, she captures emotion on the page so well. I felt like this wasn't just an exploration of her own grief and mourning, but an inquiry into capital-case Grief and Mourning. So well done, and so worth reading (if a little tough to do so at times).

Didion’s first work of nonfiction, this essay collection published in 1968, remains a classic. She writes about figures like John Wayne and Howard Hughes, her experience growing up in California, and the birth of the 1960s counterculture movement in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. Didion drew her title from the W.B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming” (“things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”) and wrestles throughout with the disruption and unease she sees at work in the culture around her.

From the publisher: "An extraordinary report on the aftermath of the 1960s in America by the New York Times–bestselling author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. From a jailhouse visit to Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton to witnessing First Lady of California Nancy Reagan pretend to pick flowers for the benefit of news cameras, Didion captures the paranoia and absurdity of the era with her signature blend of irony and insight. She takes readers to the 'giddily splendid' Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the cool mountains of Bogotá, and the Jordanian Desert, where Bishop James Pike went to walk in Jesus's footsteps—and died not far from his rented Ford Cortina. She anatomizes the culture of shopping malls—'toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes'—and exposes the contradictions and compromises of the women's movement. In the iconic title essay, she documents her uneasy state of mind during the years leading up to and following the Manson murders—a terrifying crime that, in her memory, surprised no one. Its power to electrify and inform remains undiminished nearly forty years after it was first published."

From the publisher: "Three essential works ... by 'one of our sharpest and most trustworthy cultural observers' (The New York Times). Slouching Towards Bethlehem: America in the 1960s—a pivotal era of social change and generational divide. Named to Time magazine’s list of the one hundred best and most influential nonfiction books, this is 'a rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country' (The New York Times Book Review). The White Album: A New York Times bestseller, this landmark essay collection confronts the dark aftermath of the 1960s. From a jailhouse visit to Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, to a recording session with The Doors, from the culture of shopping malls to the contradictions of the women's movement, Joan Didion captures the paranoia and absurdity of the era with irony and insight. After Henry: Whether reporting on a Hollywood murder or the 'sideshows' of foreign wars, Joan Didion crystalizes her reputation as a brilliant essayist."