Didion/Idiom

I am struggling through the last several pages of Joan Didion's memoir through the lens of grief and death, The Year of Magical Thinking, now a Broadway play starring Katherine Hepburn, and when I say struggling I don't mean that the writing is poor -- it's an obsessive attempt to process grief and mourning -- but that it's an obsessive attempt to process grief and mourning, and thus not the most pleasant thing to read. But as is typical, it's driven me in tangential ways to order, via the Blockbuster account, Panic in Needle Park (Al Pacino's 2nd film), which she co-wrote with her now deceased husband John Gregory Dunne, as well as Hitchcock's Spellbound, to which she compares the recurring vortexes in her life. And now I also see that Blockbuster, in their over-anxious urge to please, has shipped Shaun of the Dead and Laurel & Hardy: Sons of the Desert/The Music Box/Another Fine Mess. I have to admit we are glad to be out from under the compulsion of Six Feet Under (all five seasons in six weeks) and I Love Lucy. So it's off to the races, as they say. Whoever They are.