On John Gregory Dunne's 'Vegas: Memory of a Dark Season'

John Gregory Dunne was married with Joan Didion. In 1973, he'd had enough of life, of his marriage, of more things; he left his wife and their child and moved to Las Vegas. As he left, he didn't know he was going to stay there for a year. This experience turned into a book: Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season. I am always being told things like that on first meeting, being told by strange women that they have cancer of the uterus, by men on airplanes that they have a colored mistress in St. Louis. Never black, never Negro, always "colored." I have never learned how to react, never comprehended why I am selected for these intimacies. Perhaps it is a penance for the deaf ear I turn to the problems of friends. I cannot bear to listen to why they are leaving their wives or how they are treating their alcoholism. "Really," I say to these strangers with uterine malignancies, or "I see." I never do see. The language is straight, neat, short. At first, I was reminded of a more erudite and far…