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Vegas: A Memoir Of A Dark Season
Hard cover book with dust cover in vg condition. We ship worldwide from San Francisco bay area.
288 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication June 17, 2025
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1,069 people want to read
About the author
John Gregory Dunne
20books120followersJohn Gregory Dunne was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic.
He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by observing others. He graduated from Princeton University in 1954 and worked as a journalist for Time magazine. He married novelist Joan Didion on 30 January 1964, and they became collaborators on a series of screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976) and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of his own novel. He is the author of two non-fiction books about Hollywood, The Studio and Monster.
As a literary critic and essayist, he was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends and Crooning.
He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr.
He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through the cultural landscape of Los Angeles.
He died in Manhattan of a heart attack, in December 2003. His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.
He was father to Quintana Roo Dunne, who died in 2005 after a series of illnesses, and uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist).
His wife, Joan Didion, published The Year of Magical Thinking in October 2005 to great critical acclaim, a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was seriously ill. It won the National Book Award.
He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by observing others. He graduated from Princeton University in 1954 and worked as a journalist for Time magazine. He married novelist Joan Didion on 30 January 1964, and they became collaborators on a series of screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976) and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of his own novel. He is the author of two non-fiction books about Hollywood, The Studio and Monster.
As a literary critic and essayist, he was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends and Crooning.
He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr.
He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through the cultural landscape of Los Angeles.
He died in Manhattan of a heart attack, in December 2003. His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.
He was father to Quintana Roo Dunne, who died in 2005 after a series of illnesses, and uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist).
His wife, Joan Didion, published The Year of Magical Thinking in October 2005 to great critical acclaim, a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was seriously ill. It won the National Book Award.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 15, 2010
It's been a while since I read this one. I learned about Dunne from my obsession with his wife, Joan Didion. We had a copy at the LA Public Library when I worked there, so I checked it out. Dunne is a great writer and he writes profoundly about his time in Vegas. For me, it captured the wonderful darkness of the connection between LA and Vegas in the 70s. There is a self-aware self-destructiveness to it that spoke strongly to me when I read it. This is definitely work checking out if you're interested in a time capsule of Vegas from the 1970s and a look into the life of a writer making it through that decade.
March 8, 2017
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne (Random House, 1974)
On day John Gregory Dunne woke up to the realization that he was terribly unhappy. Married to the brilliant writer Joan Didion, they lived in Los Angeles, wrote for the movies, published books, adopted a daughter named Quintana Roo, and drank and smoked heavily. What's new about all that? To avoid a breakdown once, John Gregory fled to Vegas, where he nursed his life back to health I suppose, though fleeing to Vegas to solve an emotional problem seems counterproductive.
I read Vegas to remember what the early 70's were like and I was pleased and excited to find a mordant, taut, surprisingly noir novel that satisfied my every need for escape. Dunne plunders the noir genre and people's his book (a memoir manqué) with characters--a broken down private eye, dealers, gamblers, husbands-on-the-run (like himself), and a particularly tough and poignant black hooker. They each have a great name, emblematic of something bleak, humorous and lost.
You can read this book in a few hours and come away feeling refreshed by all the bullshit there is in the world. After a quick scotch and a cigarette, you'll know that nothing changes because it can't.
Who cares anyway when we've got Vegas.
On day John Gregory Dunne woke up to the realization that he was terribly unhappy. Married to the brilliant writer Joan Didion, they lived in Los Angeles, wrote for the movies, published books, adopted a daughter named Quintana Roo, and drank and smoked heavily. What's new about all that? To avoid a breakdown once, John Gregory fled to Vegas, where he nursed his life back to health I suppose, though fleeing to Vegas to solve an emotional problem seems counterproductive.
I read Vegas to remember what the early 70's were like and I was pleased and excited to find a mordant, taut, surprisingly noir novel that satisfied my every need for escape. Dunne plunders the noir genre and people's his book (a memoir manqué) with characters--a broken down private eye, dealers, gamblers, husbands-on-the-run (like himself), and a particularly tough and poignant black hooker. They each have a great name, emblematic of something bleak, humorous and lost.
You can read this book in a few hours and come away feeling refreshed by all the bullshit there is in the world. After a quick scotch and a cigarette, you'll know that nothing changes because it can't.
Who cares anyway when we've got Vegas.
December 28, 2017
I'm not 100% sure why I found this pulpy, sometimes vile, novel so damn compelling, but I could not put it down.
July 17, 2019
I know of this guy as Joan Didion's husband. The biography I read about her and the interviews I've seen of him have predisposed me to dislike him. He's pompous and pretentious. He seems to have no sense of humor.
So I read this because I thought I should see what his writing was all about, if there was anything to his pretensions and high opinion of himself. Plus, I'm going to Vegas next month and this book is called Vegas.
Meh. The conceited narrative style irritated me: this is a novel, but he says that the "I" is mostly really him. And he made stuff up but "types" like the ones he describes actually exists. (Having read about how he and Didion competed for who would get to use anecdotes and observations in their work, it hardly surprises me that he barely made up anything, just cribbing from people's lives. Or in his quotation of Didion, which he seems to find accurate and yet still seems proud of it, his "vandalizing" of their lives. Can you tell I don't like this guy?)
So the Vegas part is...fine. His characters are a prostitute, a private investigator, and a comic. Because Vegas. It's so cliche, it's painful. The prostitute is kind of dumb and you can't take her anywhere because she talks about anal sex. The private eye is clever but unscrupulous but good at his job. The comic is ambitious but reaching is tier-two peak. They are Vegas "types," and his treatment of them doesn't feel fresh or interesting. Most of his interactions with them consist of him describing them with barely concealed contempt--can you believe people live like this? The rest is a rumination on his adolescence and early life, complete with the "objective" stories about masturbation and failed romances (incidentally, in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion mentions that Dunne was reading Sophie's Choice on the night he died, and now I see why he admired it: in among the compelling center plotline are a bunch of asides about the narrator trying to get laid and lamenting how frigid all women are; maybe Styron stole it from him).
Mostly I just thought about what a tool he was and devoured the parts where he discusses Didion (mostly in phonecalls during which she sounds vaguely annoyed at being bothered but still supportive of his "work" in a roundabout kind of way--sounds about right). Whereas I find her detestable but interesting and a unique writer, I just found him detestable and acceptable as a writer. Meh.
So I read this because I thought I should see what his writing was all about, if there was anything to his pretensions and high opinion of himself. Plus, I'm going to Vegas next month and this book is called Vegas.
Meh. The conceited narrative style irritated me: this is a novel, but he says that the "I" is mostly really him. And he made stuff up but "types" like the ones he describes actually exists. (Having read about how he and Didion competed for who would get to use anecdotes and observations in their work, it hardly surprises me that he barely made up anything, just cribbing from people's lives. Or in his quotation of Didion, which he seems to find accurate and yet still seems proud of it, his "vandalizing" of their lives. Can you tell I don't like this guy?)
So the Vegas part is...fine. His characters are a prostitute, a private investigator, and a comic. Because Vegas. It's so cliche, it's painful. The prostitute is kind of dumb and you can't take her anywhere because she talks about anal sex. The private eye is clever but unscrupulous but good at his job. The comic is ambitious but reaching is tier-two peak. They are Vegas "types," and his treatment of them doesn't feel fresh or interesting. Most of his interactions with them consist of him describing them with barely concealed contempt--can you believe people live like this? The rest is a rumination on his adolescence and early life, complete with the "objective" stories about masturbation and failed romances (incidentally, in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion mentions that Dunne was reading Sophie's Choice on the night he died, and now I see why he admired it: in among the compelling center plotline are a bunch of asides about the narrator trying to get laid and lamenting how frigid all women are; maybe Styron stole it from him).
Mostly I just thought about what a tool he was and devoured the parts where he discusses Didion (mostly in phonecalls during which she sounds vaguely annoyed at being bothered but still supportive of his "work" in a roundabout kind of way--sounds about right). Whereas I find her detestable but interesting and a unique writer, I just found him detestable and acceptable as a writer. Meh.
March 9, 2022
“I liked to think…that I could learn something about myself from the people whose lives I intruded upon, indeed that was the reason I had taken up residence in an apartment behind the strip.�
I read this book in the 4 week period after I had gone to Las Vegas for the first time, and it’s almost poetic in that way. While there, I was searching for this darkness I had associated with the City of Sin, and trying to pull out the parcels of my experience to fit that narrative. I hoped that it would provide me some kind of an explanation for my curiosities, for my longing to be apart of some greater state of being that’s bathed in money, booze, sex, and lights. All I came home with is less money, a pierced nipple that’s still healing, and a viscous hangover.
Although I disagree with many things the narrator confided with his reader, I found my self emphasizing with him. In places that are so foreign and stimulating as Vegas, it is losing yourself in the peaks and valley’s of other’s lives that allow us the perspective to reflect inward.
I read this book in the 4 week period after I had gone to Las Vegas for the first time, and it’s almost poetic in that way. While there, I was searching for this darkness I had associated with the City of Sin, and trying to pull out the parcels of my experience to fit that narrative. I hoped that it would provide me some kind of an explanation for my curiosities, for my longing to be apart of some greater state of being that’s bathed in money, booze, sex, and lights. All I came home with is less money, a pierced nipple that’s still healing, and a viscous hangover.
Although I disagree with many things the narrator confided with his reader, I found my self emphasizing with him. In places that are so foreign and stimulating as Vegas, it is losing yourself in the peaks and valley’s of other’s lives that allow us the perspective to reflect inward.
March 14, 2025
“there is a therapeutic aspect to reporting that few like to admit…Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems. There is always someone in deeper emotional drift, or even grift, than you, someone to whom you can ladle out understanding as if it were a charitable contribution, one free meal from the psychic soup kitchen…�
June 29, 2022
It was good. I love taking those temporal trips back. Also the few snippets of his relationship with Joan are worth the price of admission alone.
April 24, 2022
What a funny read. Many times I found myself literally laughing aloud. I can see why he and Joan were such a match: both dry, both depressed, both smart, both funny. It was incredibly difficult to get my hands on a copy of this � I ended up renting it through Internet Archives, and I'm so glad I did. The characters he encountered in Vegas are worth getting to know, especially Artha! Definitely recommend.
July 24, 2021
"In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada. It had been a bad spring, it had been a bad winter, it had been a bad year."
May 8, 2020
I really enjoyed reading this, especially all the Buster Mano stories which would have really made me beg John Gregory Dunne if he can write a novel only on Buster Mano whether it’s fiction or non-fiction with a bit of fiction if he was still here. I can’t look at a bail bond office anymore without saying “will get you out of jail, and put you on the street�.
August 5, 2024
One of those books where a writer goes to a place and meets a bunch of odd people, writes down the strange things he sees and hears, and also throws in a lot of loosely connected autobiographical information that all adds up not to a constructed narrative but a mishmash of observations. Interesting about a quarter of the time that I was able to try to track with all the madness.
November 6, 2024
This book was last checked out in 1984.
I feel a bizarre connection to those who have taken out books before me - the stains, odours, and highlighted sections conjure a different story to the one I am reading.
This book is still in fairly good condition - I hope it is not another 40 years before someone else checks it out.
3.5 stars
I feel a bizarre connection to those who have taken out books before me - the stains, odours, and highlighted sections conjure a different story to the one I am reading.
This book is still in fairly good condition - I hope it is not another 40 years before someone else checks it out.
3.5 stars
May 15, 2024
Not in a value judgment way: they do not make them like they used to
Want to read
June 28, 2009As seen on . Don't mess with Didion!
September 30, 2014
Not one of the best books I ever read; not even in the top sixty percent. Cute (if kitschy) vegas-type characters, but a total absence of direction or plot. Sort of a waste of time.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
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