Didion’s Year: A Memoir

By STEPHEN MOTIKA Palisadian-Post Contributor In the first semester of my freshman year at college in New York in 1995, I had a love affair with the writing of Joan Didion. I read nearly everything she had written up to that time, including the novels “Play it As it Lays” and “The Book of Common Prayer” as well as the essay collections “The White Album,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” and “After Henry.” I was homesick, and Didion wrote about California in just the right way’a bit removed, just a bit off the nerve center’so when I read her, I felt reminded of home, but never overwhelmingly so. The love affair came to a quick end when I read her novel “The Last Things He Wanted,” published in 1996. The book disappointed me; it felt like a repeat of her previous novels. I wrote a dismissive review of it for my college newspaper. I wasn’t interested in reading her new work. Still, for quite some time, I retained a Didion quotation as my “signature” on all the e-mails. It read: “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” Now, she has written a book about the unforgettable: the sudden death of her husband of 40 years, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and the illness of their daughter Quintana, who suffered from total septic shock and then a massive hematoma. Dunne died on December 30, 2003; Quintana was in the hospital at the time and would be for much of 2004. It is a book I felt I had to read. “The Year of Magical Thinking” is not only a return to form, but an extension of Didion’s talents as a writer. She wrote the book during the autumn of 2004, finishing it a year after Dunne died. It is perhaps the fastest she has ever written anything; as she wrote it she didn’t feel as if she was writing. She said recently: “It felt just like sitting there and putting down what was on my mind, which is not the way I write.” Yet, the book is recognizably Didion’s, elliptical in nature and syntactically terse. It grew out of her medical notes, and in reading it, one notices the accretion of details and material, information and phrases are repeated throughout with little additions, little subtractions. The book also showcases how memory and the passage of time shape grief. She becomes aware of the “vortex effect” triggered each time she goes to a place she has been previously with John or Quintana. This seems most difficult when she’s away from her New York home: say, the five weeks she spends in Los Angeles while her daughter is at the UCLA Medical Center in March-April 2004. She and John lived in Los Angeles County’in Palos Verdes, Hollywood, Malibu, and Brentwood Park’from 1964 to 1988. She shares the places they lived and enjoyed in writing, but stays clear in person. Even so, she cannot remove the Santa Ana wind or the jacaranda trees while driving. Just their presence brings tears to her eyes. By the end of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion admits that she did not want the year to end, for as time goes on, the sharpness of John’s presence will fade. Yet, after completing that year and that book, she lost her daughter this past summer, and now she must face the even harder task of trying to find the “magic” of this next year. These are tragic events, but they have inspired some of the best writing from one of our most important writers. Sometimes your art is the only thing you have left.