The Color of Grief

By Lev Grossman

IF ANYBODY COULD HAVE been prepared for what happened to Joan Didion, it should have been Joan Didion. At 70, she is the author of five novels and seven works of nonfiction, all of which are distinguished by enormous intellectual force, an impatience with sentimentality and a general intolerance for bunk. Didion is one of the great clear thinkers and dry-eyed observers of her generation. When people talk about somebody being a tough customer, Didion is the kind of person they're talking about.

Then, on the night of Dec. 30, 2003, Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne, also a writer, suddenly slumped over at the dinner table. He had died of a massive heart attack. They had been married a month shy of 40 years. Just five days earlier, their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne Michael had been admitted to the hospital with pneumonia and septic shock; at the time of her father's death, she was in a coma.

Those events--her husband's death and her daughter's illness--are the subject of Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf; 227 pages). And as it turned out, nobody, not even Joan Didion, could have been ready for them.

Didion is a tiny woman, under 5 ft. and skeletally thin. Her clothes hang on her like hand-me-downs. Ropy veins stand out on her arms and hands through her translucent skin. She answers the door to her Upper East Side Manhattan apartment with a perfunctory whispered greeting, barely raising her eyes from the floor, then immediately shuffles away again. She has the air of somebody who has reached a point in her life where she is dispensing with the unnecessaries.

She could have opted out of a book tour for The Year of Magical Thinking--she is, after all, grieving and famous--but she is very much of the show-must-go-on school. "If you're going to publish something, talking to people about it kind of comes with the territory," she says. "I didn't die. My life has to continue. I don't have an option." An orchid--Phalaenopsis, she says, and spells the word for me--stands in a glass vase on her coffee table. As we talk, Didion plucks one of its large, limp white blossoms, puts it on a small plate and gently strokes it.

Didion wrote Magical Thinking quite rapidly. She began it on Oct. 4, 2004, and finished it on Dec. 31, a year and a day after Dunne died. "I had a sense that this book wasn't written at all," she says. "I just sort of sat down and typed it. It wasn't written in the sense that I usually write things." Didion's prose is usually buffed to a high polish, but with this book she deliberately made the writing less smooth, taking out the transitions ("I was sort of crazy, so transitions really didn't figure") and waving off copy editors to keep it feeling choppy, unpolished, unmediated. "I really thought that if it was going to have any value, it had to be immediate, it had to be raw." It begins in the simplest, most documentary style possible. The first words of the book are actually just rough notes she jotted down in the wake of Dunne's death, printed verbatim.

In the days and weeks following her husband's death, Didion found herself experiencing something she had never known before: true grief. It was different, she discovered, from other forms of sadness. "Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be," she writes. "Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life."

She also found that it came with a particular kind of madness, an actual insanity. "There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible," she writes. In other words, she actually began to think that if she played her cards right, she could bring her husband back to her. "I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome." That is the meaning of the book's title.

When Quintana woke from her coma, her mother had to tell her three times that her father was dead; she kept forgetting. Didion obsessively reviewed the medical records from the night Dunne died, plotting out the chronology precisely--the call to the hospital, the resuscitation attempts, the final pronouncement. Magical Thinking also skips backward in time, via memories and echoes and chance connections, to call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage to Dunne, the union of two talented, ambitious, workaholic writers who were each other's first readers and editors. To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost.

Magical Thinking is an act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity narrating the loss of that clarity, allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. But the book also reproduces, in its formal progression from those first raw, frenzied impressions to a more composed account of mourning, Didion's recovery. She literally wrote herself back to sanity. "Writing is the only way I've ever gained clarity," she says. "I don't go through life with a lot of clear-formed thoughts. It's not till I sit down and write that I really know what I think."

Real life added a tragic coda to The Year of Magical Thinking. On Aug. 26, the unthinkable happened again: at 39, Quintana died after a long illness. Didion, already a widow, became a grieving mother as well. "I haven't started being crazy for Quintana yet," she says, almost matter-of-factly, "and I'm sort of past being crazy for John. Sanity came back, and now I'm sort of still in shock about Quintana."

Unsentimental as ever, she dismisses any suggestion that she is simply being strong. "You don't have an option," she says. "It's another one of those deals in which you don't have an option." And then, amazingly, she laughs. o