The lines “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self pity.” make up part of a refrain in a memoir by this author. For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this author who wrote about the death of her husband in The Year of Magical Thinking. She described a girl taking acid and peyote in an essay about San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District.
ANSWER: Joan Didion (The essay is “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”)
[10h] The death of Didion’s daughter while writing The Year of Magical Thinking inspired her memoir titled for this adjective and “Nights.” Maggie Nelson wrote a collection as a philosophical meditation on this adjective.
ANSWER: blue [accept Blue Nights; accept Bluets]
[10e] Didion is unable to give away these objects belonging to her husband after his death in The Year of Magical Thinking. Hemingway wrote a six-word story about some of these clothing items “For sale… never worn.”
ANSWER: shoes [accept baby shoes or “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”]
<Editors, American Literature>