When Diana Taylor describes the social drama surrounding Princess Diana's death, she describes the "quasi-sacred" realm on which an "illusion of a cohesive, 'universal' audience" is played out (135). Like Di's death, the terrorist attacks of September 11 offered a global spectacle. September 11 was a social drama that thoroughly follows the Turner model outlined by Taylor. The breach of norm and crises were spectacularly visible and immediately apparent. Similarly, the redressive action and reintegration phases have been played out to construct a sense of universality. Joan Didion also constructs universality in her story "After Life." A prelude that includes tribute to September 11 tricks the reader into anticipating that what comes next is a personal memoir of a 9/11 tragedy. When it becomes clear that Didion is describing an unrelated death, the reader has already accepted Didion's universality. The reader feels a part of a fabricated social drama.
             Didion's story is compelling because it is about human universals like "death...illness...probability and luck...good fortune and bad...marriage and children and memory...grief...the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends," (2). Her tragedy contains universal elements and it therefore appears as a social drama. By writing down her tragedy Didion involves each and every reader in her story. The death of her husband becomes the death of our father, brother, friend.
             The author relishes writing as a means of purging the soul and purifying her tormented mind. Didion notes on page 3: "meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs," (3). She consciously uses the tool of writing to create a public journal about her dealing with the death of her husband.
             A core theme of "After Life" is the realization that a tragedy punctuates an otherwi...