6 Degrees of Separation

It’s time for another adventure in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. We are given a book to start with, and from there we free associate six books.

This month’s stating point is Virginia Evans’s epistolary novel, The Correspondent. In this novel we get to know Sybil Van Antwerp from her 73^rd birthday until her death about 10 years later.

first degree

One of the people to whom Sybil writes is author Joan Didion. In an example of synchronicity, the book I read right before The Correspondent also features Joan Didion as a minor character. That book is The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne. In real life, Joan Didion was an aunt by marriage to Griffin.

second degree

I have a book by Joan Didion on my list to read for Nonfiction November, Notes to John. The John of the title is Didion’s husband of more than 40 years, John Gregory Dunne.

third degree

John Gregory Dunne’s brother was Dominick Dunne, the father of Griffin Dunne, and also the author of many works of both fiction and nonfiction, including the novel An Inconvenient Woman.

fourth degree

Another novel with the word woman in the title is A Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford.

fifth degree

British actor Brenda Blethyn will be portraying Emma Harte, the protagonist of A Woman of Substance, in an upcoming British series based on the novel and its sequels. Brenda Blethyn is perhaps best known for her portrayal of DCI Vera Stanhope in the long-running series Vera, based on the novels of Ann Cleeves. The first novel in the Vera series is The Crow Trap.

sixth degree

Another novel series by Ann Cleeves that was made into a popular TV program is the Shetland books featuring detective Jimmy Perez. The opening novel in that series is Black Raven.

This has been a long and winding road through literature based in both the U.S. and the U.K. I’m curious to see where your 6 Degrees trip took you this month.

© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown