Joan Didion died on December 23. She was 87. She outlived everyone in her family except for her nephew-by-marriage, Griffin Dunne. I am grateful he was able to finish his film about her, even though I sobbed while watching.

I recall sitting in my apartment in Chicago and opening a package from the Literary Guild to find a copy of Democracy that I hadn’t ordered and which, from its cover (pink with that italicized 70s-movie-of-the-week typeface), I didn’t plan to read. And then opening it and reading:

“The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see.”

“Something to behold.”

“Something that could almost make you think you saw God, he said.”

“He said to her.”

“Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor.”

“He said: the sky was this pink no painter could approximate, one of the detonation theorists used to try, a pretty fair Sunday painter, he never got it. Just never captured it, never came close. The sky was this pink and the air was wet from the night rain, soft and wet and smelling like flowers, smelling like those flowers you used to pin in your hair when you drove out to Schofield, gardenias, the air in the morning smelled like gardenias, never mind there were not too may flowers around those shot islands.”

I was hooked, a complete Didion enthusiast. I read everything I could find, even her hard-to-locate reporting. In a lull, I would re-read The White Album.

I felt that Joan Didion was a secret, that her writing was specifically for me, that she hoped I would be made smarter and more interesting thereby. That it didn’t work out that way I never held against her.

I feel like an important part of the past 40 years of my life has become unmoored.

CLYDE A. SHUMAN,

Ossineke