Reading Groups

The Memoir and Fiction of Joan Didion with Lynn Strong (Sold Out)

Thursdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT March 17 to June 16, 2022

Online via Zoom

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This reading group has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Erich Slimak at [email protected].

Meeting Dates:
3/17, 4/14, 5/19, 6/16

The center will not hold; Goodbye to all that; we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Few writers have enmeshed themselves so fully into our collective consciousness as Joan Didion. She was a screenwriter, a novelist, a chronicler of our collective disorder and malaise; she painstakingly documented her own experiences of grief. In this class we will dive deep into the lot of it, looking at the fiction, the nonfiction, and the memoir, asking ourselves: what was she working to show us and how? How do the forms interact and overlap? What was she able to see and what about the ways she crafted her sentences made it impossible for us not to see it as well?

Session I: The White Album
Session II: Play It As It Lays
Session III: Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Session IV: The Year of Magical Thinking

Led by

Lynn Steger Strong

Lynn Steger Strong

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and the forthcoming Flight. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, the L.A. Times, the Guardian, TIME, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Columbia University.

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