2005 interview: Joan Didion on her 'Year of Magical Thinking'

In her latest book, Joan Didion writes of running into people she knows who have recently lost a spouse or child.

I think particularly about how these people looked when I saw them unexpectedly — on the street, say, or entering a room — during the year or so after the death. What struck me in each instance was how exposed they seemed, how raw.

How fragile, I understand now.

How unstable.

Didion herself looked two out of three as she opened the door to her Upper East Side apartment on an August afternoon. Her petite frame, always as lean as her prose, has shrunk alarmingly. Her exposed arms look delicate enough for a child to snap. Her inscrutable, sphinx-like face shows signs of erosion from within. But at 70, her manner is composed and alert, suggesting that she is still the acute observer who so masterfully chronicled American culture in the late 1960s and beyond with such classics as "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album."

"I know I need to eat more," she said, preempting the possibility of an inquiry. "I just don't want any of the foods that are supposed to fatten you up."

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On Dec. 30, 2003, Didion and her husband of nearly 40 years, writer John Gregory Dunne, had just returned home after visiting their 37-year-old daughter in the hospital. Quintana, the couple's only child, had been in a coma for five days because of pneumonia and septic shock. Didion set the table and served Dunne a Scotch. She mixed a salad; he commented on World War I's historical importance.

Then he stopped talking. Dunne had suffered a lethal heart attack. Nine months later, Didion sat down to write about it.

She wrote of wanting to be alone that first night, after coming home from the hospital, where she had been called a "pretty cool customer" by a social worker: "I needed to be alone so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking."

"It was comforting to write about it," she said, sitting on a small floral-patterned occasional chair that bore the telltale indentations of a favorite perch. "That's all I could have done at that moment. One reason I wanted to write it was that I wanted to read it. But I never had a sense of whether it was working or not, and quite often I would think, 'Are you mad?'"

"The Year of Magical Thinking" is devastating in its plain-spoken, carefully worded relation of facts. Didion also artfully conveys the helplessness most of us feel when confronted with hospital charts and doctorspeak and the horrible, yawning void she felt after arriving home to see her dead husband's jacket and scarf slung across a chair.

She meanders around the terrain of deep personal loss, somehow tying together disparate points and parsing the insanity of grief: "The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted," she writes, going on to give examples and apply them to her own situation.

"You can't direct [grief]," she said. "You can't micromanage it. In another life I would be a doctor. Not a surgeon, but a researcher."

While she dealt with her grief, Quintana emerged from her coma, only to undergo months of rehab and further complications that ended in her death, shortly before Didion's book was published.

In "The Year of Magical Thinking," Didion's cerebral scalpel is as sharp as ever, even when using it to dissect her own feelings and behavior. She writes that she went through a period of exaggerated fears for her own physical well-being, when she was so afraid of tripping on a sidewalk that she bought two pairs of Puma sneakers and wore nothing else on her feet.

"If I feel more physically vulnerable, I suppose it's because I am," she said. "And when there's no one around to say, `Don't step out on that windowsill.'-"

Her voice trails off. When Didion speaks in a halting, self-editing near-whisper, you can imagine her sitting frozen in front of her computer for an hour before methodically typing out a perfect sentence.

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Nothing says Manhattan like an Upper East Side apartment. But Didion's living room is also redolent of California. Looking at the row of old hurricane lamps catching the afternoon light in a north window, and the casual white modular seating, you can almost smell the beach. Books line every shelf, and dozens of framed photographs documenting the 40-year Didion/Dunne partnership and Quintana's childhood border the seating areas.

The only conventional 9-to-5 job Didion ever held was at Vogue, when she was in her early to mid-20s, "when people really did wear little black dresses," she said.

She met her future husband at a New York dinner party, and the two were just friends before falling in love, moving in together in 1963 and marrying the next year.

"John and I always made a living doing whatever came along. This takes you into a different kind of world than most people live in, a wide world you have to teach yourself about - art, architecture and, of course, writing. I was forced to improve my vocabulary to suit each character. I use the thesaurus a lot, too."

Didion and Dunne were rarely apart, a golden couple living an often-golden life split between California and New York. They collaborated on screenplays and co-wrote a column for the Saturday Evening Post called "Points West." Their social circles were filled with literati and the Hollywood smart set. Didion doesn't dwell upon such things in her new memoir, instead illustrating their easy intimacy with touching examples - their habit of watching the BBC war drama "Tenko" on California afternoons in the 1970s, a silly argument in the car over whether John would have preferred a wife who was a more accomplished hostess.

"I don't come at things directly," she said. "That used to irritate John, how I could never come out and say anything directly. Part of it is I was a shy child and I learned to be diffident."

What Didion would like people to remember most about Dunne is "how honest and funny he was," she said.

Despite many attempts by profilers and critics to pit the two against each other as writers, and qualify one as better than the other, she says they never felt competitive: "What did they think being married was about?"

For them, it was partly about being each other's front-line editors. When asked about the difficulty of writing "The Year of Magical Thinking" without her husband's suggestions, Didion's eyes well up.

"I had to stop myself from walking into the next room to show him and ask what he thought of it," she said.

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Didion still keeps routine in her days, going for regular walks in Central Park, cooking up stews and gumbo, "things you can make in a pot."

In the mornings, she reads several newspapers — the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the local tabloids and the Sun — although, she says, she has trimmed down her subscriptions.

"That's my idea of economy, canceling the news," she said.

She monitors a few blogs, including Joshua Micah Marshall's talkingpointsmemo. com, tomdispatch.com and Jim Romenesko's media digest at poynter.org. "I could spend the entire day reading them, which I don't want to do," she said.

She finds the popularity of reality TV "mystifying. I have never seen more than the first `Survivor.' It was so obviously fake and dumb."

Didion has written five novels, including the Las Vegas-set "Play It As It Lays," which was nominated for a National Book Award. But it is her seven nonfiction books that have secured her place in the literary echelon, beginning with her early New Journalism work, in which she joined Thomas Wolfe and Gay Talese in inserting the self into reports of American life. She still writes social and

political commentary for the New York Review of Books, including a recent piece on the rise of evangelical influence in government. (Didion, a sometime Republican, said she voted for John Kerry in the 2004 election.)

When asked to elaborate on her famous comment that writers are always selling somebody out, she said, "From the point of view of the person you're writing about, no one is going to see themselves as you see them. It's like hearing your own voice on tape. You feel betrayed."

Didion remains skeptical of modern feminism, which was the topic of a controversial essay she wrote in 1972 for the New York Times Magazine. "There was a time in the 1980s when women felt they needed to make a choice between raising kids and working. I personally don't think children want all the attention they get," she said.

This is the sort of blunt, bold statement that makes Didion's writing so powerful and has also given her an undeserved reputation for chilly gloominess. In this context, she was referring to the fussy, smothering kind of attention. When you look at old family photos, there can be no doubt she is a mother who thoroughly loved her child. Her habitually closed countenance - so often hidden by oversized sunglasses when she was in public - opens and glows with absolute adoration.

The first line of Didion's 1979 essay collection "The White Album" reads, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

For Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking" is one such necessary story. Even in grief, she remains a seeker, driven to document and understand.

Longtime Star Tribune staff writer Kristin Tillotson died May 11, 2016, at age 56, after a brief illness.