Everyone in the worlds in which we traveled knew that the Dunne brothers did not speak. I remember being at the star-studded premiere in Westwood, when Streisand made one of the great movie entrances. Worry if your fridge makes any of these noises. pg.acq.push(function() { Ill Let the Chips Fall Where They May: The Life and Confessions of Mob Chef David Ruggerio. A preoccupation with the question of how to tell the storywith surface, not contentallowed her to sidestep the devastatingly sad import of what her daughter had written. The minute I got to him, I knew he was dead, Joan said. In his review of Lamberts fascinating book, John wrote about Natalie, She was a movie star out of a postJoan Crawford, preJulia Roberts agepromiscuous, insecure, talented, irrational, funny, generous, shrewd, occasionally unstable, and untrusting of anyone who would get too close to herexcept for a Praetorian Guard of gay men. I was thinking to myself as I read it, He got herthat was Natalie. He understood about getting at the essence of things. My brother and I both knew Natalie Wood, and our wives were among her friends. } His diary is a mainstay of the magazine. They shared daughter Quintana Roo, who died of pancreatitis and septic shock at age 39 in 2005. situation, a trait that has made her respected if not always }); The writer examined that second excruciating loss in her 2011 memoir, Blue. }); pic.twitter.com/pQ7DVkom06, Gaddiss Ghostcoat (@GhostTrenchcoat) April 1, 2020. Two tragedies struck Didion in less than two years. Joan said they were prepared to pay only $400. After the closeness we had managed to rebuild, the thought of his not being there anymore was incomprehensible. She had, after all, helped define a generation. We were in total harmony. Unlike her mother, Quintana lived a more low-key life and didn't make the news much until her tragic death in 2005. John Gregory Dunne died of a massive heart attack. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Travis Bickle, meet Toni Morrison, in a socially probing, fiercely fun debut novel, Scott Adams says he was using hyperbole: America being programmed to see race first, Before and after photos from space show storms effect on California reservoirs, Before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, The chance of a lifetime: Five friends ski the tallest mountain in Los Angeles, 10 books to add to your reading list in March. We talked about our grandfather, the great reader, and about our mother and father, our two dead sisters, and our dead brother. It was such a nice call, so heartfelt. Anne Rice dead at 80: Son reveals final moments of 'The Vampire Chronicles' author, How did Gary Paulsen die? I could never afford to see that. With hindsight, Didion traces a very different narrative arc. She had been hospitalized since June with abdominal infections, according to her mother. In a book that is ostensibly about her daughter's death and which is largely a memoir of the nine months of her dying, what literary justification is there for that kind of obfuscation? We walked silently into the chapel. Here after all is a writer who has described the willful transgression implicit in the act of writing (do note, as she would say, that word willful), a writer who has said that the act of writing is like deciding to seize the stage. In Blue Nights a powerful case is made that writing of regret cannot ever be a perfect performance. My older brother, Richard, went to Harvard. And there were John and Joan, up there, having arrived, being photographed, getting celebrity treatment. While leaving the airport in Los Angeles, she collapsed with a cerebral hemorrhage. Everybody was clueless, everybody to do with this angel baby had no clue. Papa, as we called him, was an extraordinary man, and he had an enormous influence on my brother and me. Just this past Christmas, a few days before he died, he gave me a book by Paul Fussell called The Boys Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 19441945. They could reveal a fault, Finlands Parliament approves NATO membership in historic decision, Spain wants to create its own surface-to-air missile system (SAM) to replace the veteran Hawk. }) Quintana Roo Dunne died of complications from a flu that turned into pneumonia then septic shock, an induced coma, a brain bleed, five surgeries and months in intensive care. John was always the one who made the calls. After she turned away, I stepped up and said good-bye, followed by Tony and Rosemary. In the darkness, John and I looked at each other as if we couldnt believe that two Hartford boys were making a big Hollywood-studio movie on location in New York City. As Didion was reading, she says, she appallingly began correcting the sentences. Listen to what hes saying to you, she said emphatically. The writer who explored culture and chaos, Joan, recently passed away at the age of 87 and amid her mourning, the attention has fallen . } Difficult. We were always competitive. If we were at the same party, Joan and I always spoke and then moved away from each other. Stephen was the youngest of the six of us, but he was the first to go. Read her obituary here. She was diagnosed with an attack of vertigo and nausea after undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. He started in the grocery business and ended up a bank president. A young woman is dead. Quintana Roo Dunne died on August 26, 2005, at the age of 39, as a result of severe pancreatitis. Quintana does not manage to absorb the news until months later, when she is again in an ICU, this time in Los Angeles. Ad Choices. Didion revealed that "she described so often and with such troubling specificity that I was frequently moved to check for him on the terrace outside her second-floor windows," in her memoir 'Blue Nights'. Nor does "septicemia," "septic," or "sepsis." I spoke to Lenny about it one morning in window.googletag.pubads().addEventListener('slotRenderEnded', function(event) { This time, there was no coming back. The book instead bears harsh witness to the realization that the past can never be fixed (a realization many parents must at some point confront). Even when John and I werent speaking, we would meet up at family funerals. Its a scary thing when they call to tell you that you have cancer. In the early 70s, John, Joan, and I formed a film company called Dunne-Didion-Dunne. It included: "Brush your teeth," "Brush your hair" and "Shush, I'm working." The new football rules for the 22/23 season: When will it be a penalty or offside? Quintana died on August 26, at the tender age of 39. But perhaps she is best known for her work on grief, coming from a deeply personal space of a life mired in tragedy. Im pretty good in that department myself. In 2017, Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne. The regret memoir is another thing altogether, a stranger, patchwork beast. Matesa suggests that Didion is "in denial" about her daughter's probable alcoholism, denial which "unfortunately has the ability to distort the thinking of even our most beloved intellectuals and artists and, ultimately, to hide the full truth of their stories." We all gathered in New Canaan, Connecticut, a few days later to attend Stephens funeral. But all that success in the kitchen belied the double life he was leading as a rank-and-file member of the Mob. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion addressed the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. eventCategory: event.slot.getSlotElementId(), There were difficult periods. Readers of Didions recent memoir about her daughters death, Blue Nights, may be forgiven for remaining perplexed about what killed Quintana Roo Dunne Michaels even after finishing the book. To skirt the paradoxes of this workto focus simply, as some critics have, on how heartbreaking it isis to diminish the complexity of Didions mind. Her husband's death and her daughter's illness were written about in The Year of Magical. It is pricklier, more nihilistic, composed knowing that the center hasnt held, rather than out of a fraught awareness that the center cannot hold.. It was going to press when, on Aug. 26, her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, a photographer and photo editor who had been hospitalized since June, died at 39 after a long series of. Author. Eibar: La Romareda, the necessary starting point to take off at home. On Friday nights we would often stay over at his house, and he would read the classics or poetry to us and give us each a 50-cent piece for listeninga lot of money to a kid back then. When Didion said good-bye, Quintana seemed anxious. Its a glorious thing. As Didion writes, disturbingly: Memories are what you no longer want to remember.. He was never without a book, and he read voraciously. Who was Joan Didion's daughter Quintana Roo Dunne? Why choose to leave the death at the center of the story so cloaked in mystery that even critics can't tell what actually happened? They wrote, and I produced. Didion suggests that all this mythologizing led both parents not to treat Quintana as her own person, with her own story. } It was Al Pacinos first starring role, and he was mesmerizing as the doomed Bobby. (Tellingly, the mnemonic doctors apparently use to remember the condition's causes is "I GET SMASHED.") Quintana Roo fell ill in 2003, and her father had a fatal heart attack several days later. If I called him with a hot piece of gossip Id heard, rather than reacting to it, hed top it with a story hed heard. The final break came over the defense attorney Leslie Abramson, who defended Erik Menendez, one of two rich Beverly Hills brothers who shot their parents to death in 1989. "It has not left my mind since it happened," Didion says haltingly. Didion jokingly admits she was a nag who was "was totally wrapped up in keeping some time free for myself.". I was in combat and received a Bronze Star Medal for saving a wounded soldiers life in Felsberg, Germany, on December 20, 1944. An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Is Joan Didion In Denial? The Boston Globe said that "a battery of arcane physical problems that included a cerebral hemorrhage and pancreatitis" caused the death. Several times in magazine articles he mentioned my wartime experience at such a young age. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. My brother and sister-in-laws daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, a recent bride, had been since Christmas night in an induced coma in the intensive-care unit of Beth Israel hospital, because of a case of flu that had turned into a virulent strain of pneumonia. For Didion, the apprehensions arrived gradually. A few months prior to its release, her only child Quintana Roo died on 26 August 2005 in New York City of complications from an abdominal infection. John and Joan bailed me out. Finally, in despair, I left Hollywood early one morning and lived for six months in a cabin in Camp Sherman, Oregon, with neither telephone nor television. },false) She died on August 26. Be seen, he said. Quintana Roo Dunne was better known as the daughter of the late American writer, Joan Didion. When we were kids, we stressed the bank-president part of his life rather than the grocery part. Nor, she says, did the writing of Blue Nights. It was a medical . As Didion tells it here, the story of Quintanas adoption had a mythic element. Dominick Dunne, Griffin Dunne, John Gregory Dunne, and Joan Didion, photographed for. After his funeral, I began to rethink my life. All it can do is express the dissonance of it. But this does reinforce my initial take on Blue Nights that, as a book, it is not of a piece with Didion's excellent earlier work, that in the move from reportage to memoir, Didion's control of her material has wavered. hitType: 'event', Didions memoir about her husbands death, The Year of Magical Thinking, is set for release Oct. 4 by Alfred A. Knopf. She played no part in my life. Quintana Roo was born on March 3, 1966, in Santa Monica, California, and was adopted at birth by John and Joan. eventAction: 'view' After her father's funeral, Quintana slipped at the airport, hit her head on the pavement, and developed a massive hematoma, necessitating six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center. Joan Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, died back in 2005 after suffering from multiple complex health problems. When it came time for college, my father was adamant that we go to the best schools in the East. He was in a plain wooden box with no satin lining. Easy. He was made a Knight of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XII for his philanthropic work for the poor of Hartford. How could I not have had misconceptions? Didion writes now. In fact, Quintana reportedly had a "fascination" with meeting her biological mother, leading to an attempted reunion in 1988. One day early on a social worker comes to check on the baby; Didion stages a scene of domestic bliss, with Quintana playing outside on the lawn, but the housekeeper spots a snake and snatches her away. Dunne had collapsed in 2003 at their table and died of a heart attack even as their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was gravely ill in hospital. She put her hands over his. hitType: 'event', She established a distinctive voice in American fiction before turning to political reporting and screenplay writing. She has saved the tiny dresses her daughter wore when she was 4 and 5 years old hanging in Quintana's closet is a black wool challis dress with a rose print that she bought at Bendel's. Tragedy struck again when Quintana, having recovered from a serious illness, fell at Los Angeles airport and suffered a serious brain injury. We were also both friends of Gavin Lamberts. She stood in her living room and received the friends who came to call. They were very much a part of the New York literary scene. Quintana would never have faulted me for that. The genre includes books such as C. S. Lewiss A Grief Observed, Joyce Carol Oates A Widows Story, and Didions own The Year of Magical Thinking. She leaned over and kissed him. While my wife and I were strictly Beverly Hills people, John and Joan lived in interesting places. On a patio deck overlooking the ocean, Quintana Roo Dunne (L) leans on a railing with her parents, American authors and scriptwriters John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, Malibu, California, 1976 . As Didion puts it, How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.. The book was published in 2005, months after their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne their only child died at age 39. Then they bought a wonderful house on the beach in Trancas and rebuilt it. Then Joan and John made a mint on the movie A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand, which was an enormous success, and in which they had a share of the profits. My novels were more socially rarefied and dealt with high-life criminals. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. Our brother Richard, a successful insurance broker in Hartford, managed to remain neutral, but he was troubled over the schism. }); Quintana was rushed to the hospital with the flu and a fever of 103. The "mysterious" illness began when, in December of 2003, There are some writers who enter our consciousness at just the right time and remain firmly lodged. His best-selling novel True Confessions, about two Irish Catholic brothers, one a priest and the other a police lieutenant, was made into a film starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall. Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, 39, the daughter of writers Joan Didion and the late John Gregory Dunne, died Aug. 26 at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital. ga('ads.send', { Looking back, she sees the scene in metaphorical terms: There could be no snake in Quintana Roos garden. I was at my house in Connecticut that night, sitting in front of the fire, reading Johns provocative review in The New York Review of Books of Gavin Lamberts new biography, Natalie Wood: A Life. "We had 66 dresses that she got for christening presents. Baby Mia Jade Riley: Parents Lani and Tom Riley speak out after dog attack killed their 5-week-old infant, Kyle Sambrook: Hiker falls 100ft to death while carrying his dog in one hand through 'appalling' weather, Bruce Willis's mom Marlene 'not sure if her son still recognizes her' as 'aggressiveness' creeps in, Julia Faustyna: 21-yr-old girl who claims to be Madeleine McCann admits to making 'pornographic videos' in past, 'End this crazy show': Julia Wandelt may seek court's help for DNA test to prove she is Madeleine McCann. Reports say she had progressed to septic shock and banged her head on the asphalt after collapsing at the airport. Does Alan Cumming Really Live in a Scottish Castle? The following year John and Joan wrote the screenplay for Play It as It Lay which was based on Joans best-selling novel of the same name. Then we left. I couldn't talk about it at first, but I can now.". In a room lined with bookshelves, Quintana Roo Dunne sits on a desk and pets a dog while her parents, American authors and scriptwriters John Gregory. It was good to speak about family again. An eruption had long been building between John and me, and Abramson just lit the match. ADVERTISEMENT The mystery of Quintana's death While recovering, she suffered acute pancreatitis in August 2005 during a promotional event for 'The Year of Magical Thinking'. But as Beyer would soon realize, Finchs past wasnt what she claimedand Beyers own difficult history was up for the taking. Editor's note: Joan Didion died on Dec. 23, 2021, at the age of 87. The ambulance arrived. Within a few months of her death, on December 30, 2005, her father, Dunne, died after suffering a massive heart attack, at the age of 71. They were almost never out of each others sight. All the hostility that had built up simply vanished. ga('ads.send', { hitType: 'event', On Christmas Day, her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was diagnosed with pneumonia and the following day developed septic shock; days later, her husband of nearly 40 years, John Gregory Dunne . The cause of death was Parkinsons disease, according to Paul Bogaards, an executive at Didions publisher Knopf. Didion postponed his funeral for three months, waiting for Quintana to be well enough to attend. Then, by happenstance, I ran into my brother at eight oclock in the morning in the hematology department of New YorkPresbyterian Hospital, where we were both giving blood samples, he for his heart, I for my P.S.A. While recovering, she suffered acute pancreatitis in August 2005 during a promotional event for 'The Year of Magical Thinking'. With Didion now too gone, it's a mystery that may perhaps never be solved. who has never not stated exactly what was on her mind in any given A public school in a section of the city known as Frog Hollowthe old Irish sectionis named after him. Drily, she notes that she had not considered the need for a bassinette and describes the two of them celebrating with a baby Quintana in mob fixer Sidney Korshaks booth at The Bistro on the day the adoption was made legal. Quintana Roo Dunne Michael . Indeed, its Didions keen eye for the contradictions in our cultural myths that has made her one of Americas greatest writers. Two days later, Quintana flew out to California with her husband "to restart their life," as Didion wrote in Magical Thinking. Quintana Roo Dune was born March 3, 1966, in Santa Monica, California, United States and died on August 26, 2005, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. She needed brain surgery to remove a hematoma as a result. Our nephew Richard Dunne Jr. was killed when his plane crashed in the airport at Hyannis, Massachusetts. It is crucial to note that the title of Blue Nights doesnt evoke the diminishing nights of late summer, as one might imagine, but their opposite: that period of early summer promise when the mind is deluded by possibilitywhen, as Didion puts it, you think the end of day will never come. This fantasy is the true subject of Blue Nights, which speaks powerfully about the illusion that each of us might somehow escape death or cheat time. Didion wrote about her daughter's death at age 39 in . They had breakfast at the Three Guys Restaurant on weekdays and at the Carlyle hotel on Sundays. We talked about Dominique, who had been close to John and Joan and Quintana. eventAction: 'load' Over the next few days she developed pneumonia, then septic shock. Last year, when I was sued for slander by former congressman Gary Condit, I was loath to go out in public, but John insisted we have a family meal at their regular table at Elios. After college, I went into television in 1950 and married Ellen Griffin, a ranching heiress known as Lenny, in 1954. [Image description: A young Joan Didion sits with her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, on her lap. Losing Quintana. There were misunderstandings and the kinds of complications that so often occur in large families. I hadnt realized how much I missed Johns humor. "We had many dresses," Didion says. Readers of Didion's recent memoir of grieving her daughter, Blue Nights, may be forgiven for remaining somewhat unclear, even upon finishing the book, as to what exactly killed Quintana Roo Dunne Michaels. Did alcoholism kill Quintana? The trial was a disaster. The memoir was a best-seller and a near . Dunne himself proudly describes Quintana as a child who could pick an agent out of a police lineup, and who approaches adolescence with what I can only describe as panache [with] casual arrogance, the implicit sense that no one has ever done it any better., She was already a person, Didion observes now, of the young Quintana. 3. And while Blue Nights is a strange, imperfect book, it is also indelible, and for this reason it earns its odd space in Didions canon: She is our finest living cultural essayist, not only because she is an iconoclastic thinker with one of the finest prose styles around, but because her writing taps into one of postwar lifes most vital contradictions. Subsequently, she had mind a medical procedure for hematoma. Joan is not a Catholic, and John was a lapsed Catholic. Our father was an extremely successful heart surgeon and the president of a hospital. How could her curiosity fail her at this juncture? The essayist who has carefully staged each personal revelation shes ever offered (her psychiatric report; her list of what to pack on reporting trips; her susceptibility to migraine) now seems to invite us behind the scenes. She was 39 years old. I was the second and John was the fifth of six children in a well-to-do Irish Catholic family in West Hartford, Connecticut. From Times Staff and Wire Reports Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, 39, the daughter of writers Joan Didion and the late John Gregory Dunne, died Aug. 26 at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. Joan may be tiny. It is, rather, an account of Didions circling questions about her own accountability for Quintanas struggles and her sense of ultimate mortalitywhich is as much a subject of the book as Quintana is. My brother the writer John Gregory Dunne, with whom I have had a complicated relationship over the years, as Irish Catholic brothers of our era often did, died unexpectedly on the night of December 30. endearing. Sitting behind Didion in her New York apartment are photographs of herself holding Quintana Roo, and a photograph from Quintana Roo's 2003 wedding. Griffin Dunne was born on June 8, 1955 in New York City, the oldest child of Dominick Dunne, a producer, actor, and writer, and Ellen Beatriz (Griffin) Dunne, an activist.His sister was actress Dominique Dunne.He grew up mainly in Los Angeles, California and attended school in Colorado before moving back to New York in the late 1970s. Now, in the aftermath of her death, those tragedies have come back into focus. I never once saw her outside of the courtroom. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of . It had become too public. first I was too stunned by the killing for this to matter, but as the We went to private schools and to Mrs. Godfreys dancing classes. Moderate. In the early 1970s, Dominick Dunne produced two films written by younger brother John Gregory Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion: "The Panic in Needle Park" introduced Al Pacino to the screen in 1971 . Photograph: CG/AP. Dont hide. I took his advice. We lived in a big, gray stone house in the best part of town, and our parents belonged to the country club. Didion and Dunne planned to take the infant Quintana to Saigon, because they already had plans to go; Didion recounts shopping for a flowered Porthault parasol to shade the baby, as if she and I were about to board a Pan Am flight and disembark at Le Cercle Sportif. The couple assiduously build a vision of Quintana as the perfect child, with John urging Didion to come watch their daughtera towhead in that Malibu sundescend the hill toward the glowingly blue Pacific on her way to school. The family finally held a funeral for [Quintana's father, John Gregory] Dunne, also at St. John the Divine, on March 23, 2004. Was John jealous? It is, more properly, a regret memoir. Dunne and Ms. Didion were probably Americas best known writing couple, and were anointed as the First Family of Angst by The Saturday Review in 1982 for their unflinching explorations of the national soul, or often, the glaring lack of one. They dined out regularly, primarily at Elios, a celebrity-oriented Italian restaurant on Second Avenue at 84th Street, where they always had the same table, next to framed jackets of two of their books. American author and scriptwriter Joan Didion sits on a couch with her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne at their home, Malibu, California, 1976. Instead they went to Hawaii, a favorite getaway place of theirs, and began a life of total togetherness that was nearly unparalleled in modern marriage. How? Didion and Dunne relocated to California, where they adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, in 1967. Then, three years ago, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It started out as strep. In it, the famously austere Didion draws the curtain back to ask whether she herself was susceptible to the same kinds of confusions her work made a habit of exposing. Yes. Quintana Roo Dunne's death cause was due to acute pancreatitis which she got after pneumonia and brain hematoma. Didion is a world-class journalist. We kept in touch with our brother Richard, who had retired and moved from Hartford to Harwich Port, on Cape Cod. Quintana Roo Dunne was the little girl of eminent American author guardians late. The memoir was a bestseller and a. She had worn it that way as a child when we lived at the beach. "Mystery surrounded the sequence of events," notes the magazine. The sequence of events was shrouded in mystery, the magazine writes. Quintana Roo Dunne, what happened? When Didion and Dunne welcomed their baby, Quintana, in 1966, Didion worried that she "would not be up to . The crux of our difficulties came when John dedicated one of his books to her at the very time she and I were in public conflict. She fell into an extended illness and died at the age of 39. eventCategory: event.slot.getSlotElementId(), She was best known for her roles in the television series "Parenthood" and "The O.C.". The film is called Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. The circular design of the power strip allows for the 15" to coil up inside the body of the productmaking it easy to wrap up and throw in a bag to take with you when traveling. A terrible resentment builds when youve borrowed money and cant pay it back, although they never once reminded me of my obligation. In December 2003, Dunne suffered a heart attack and died after he and his wife visited their daughter in the hospital, where she was in intensive care. She may weigh less than 80 pounds. Quintana Roo Dunne died of complications from a flu that turned into pneumonia then septic shock, an induced coma, a brain bleed, five surgeries and months in intensive care. Was I the problem? We went to an elocution teacher named Alice J. Buckley, who must have been good, because we both stopped stuttering years ago. }) The lady wanted $800 a month. Everything started going downhill for the late woman in 2003 when she was admitted to ICU with septic shock caused by pneumonia. In Blue Nights, Didion writes that in theory, these mementos should bring back the moment, but in fact, they only make clear how inadequately she appreciated the moment back when it happened. Didion published Play It as It Lays in 1970, four years after she adopted her daughter. But she does offer another telling scene. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. She had additionally advanced to septic shock. After that my brother and I did not speak for more than six years. My nephew Anthony Dunne and his wife, Rosemary Breslin, the daughter of the writer Jimmy Breslin, went with Joan and me to identify Johns body at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, on Madison Avenue and 81st Street, before he was cremated. A certain amount of confusion is probably inevitable: Quintana was ill for nine months, and was hospitalized numerous times for various conditions, from which complications then arose. eventCategory: event.slot.getSlotElementId(), She died at the age of 39-year-old on August 26, 2005, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Reunion in 1988 on August 26, at the age of 39: 'event ', she suffered acute which... Was mesmerizing as the daughter of the New football rules for the poor of Hartford a bank president anne dead! 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