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I Write to Find Out What I am Thinking

Collected Non Fiction
Brief Description
The perfect book for all the new readers brought to Didion through her bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking. This hardcover omnibus edition of Didion's collected nonfiction contains her final four books: Blue Nights, South and West, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and her... Read More
Format: Hardback
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The perfect book for all the new readers brought to Didion through her bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking.

This hardcover omnibus edition of Didion's collected nonfiction contains her final four books: Blue Nights, South and West, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and her bestselling and most famous work, The Year of Magical Thinking.

In her essay Why I Write (included in this volume), Joan Didion explained what lies behind her iconic nonfiction writing: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means."

Across her long and prolific career, readers have been blessed time and again by her brilliance as a prose stylist and a social commentator. From her unforgettable reckonings with grief (for her husband in The Year of Magical Thinking and for her daughter in Blue Nights), to her exploration of two iconic regions of America in South and West, through the indelible pieces of reporting collected from across her career in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the books collected here show Didion at her bestβ€”bearing witness to our history, illuminating our culture, and shedding light on the human condition.

Series: Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781841594323

Publisher: Everyman

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 14 August 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Everyman's Library

Contributors:

  • Introduction by Griffin Dunne

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 40.0mm

Width: 133.0mm

Height: 216.0mm

Weight: 750g

Pages: 472

About the Author

Joan Didion (Author) JOAN DIDION (1934-2021) was born in Sacramento, California. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue. She went on to write five novels and ten nonfiction books, as well as co-authoring screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, for 'The Panic in Needle Park', 'Play It as It Lays', and 'A Star is Born', among others. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Centre USA's Lifetime Achievement Award.

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