I had a slim novel of hers on my shelf for years, something I had picked up because I had marked her as a writer I needed to read. I would leaf through the pages, the sparse writing, finding a dryness that I could not understand or embrace. I love writing enough to know that what a person cannot understand or love about a piece of work can, later- sometimes much later- turn into the very things that we value most, so the novel stayed in its place.
Years later, I read The Year of Magical Thinking. This is Mrs. Didion's horrifying- it is, to me- true life story of the death first her beloved best friend, writing partner and husband of a million years to a heart attack, followed by the sepsis induced, months long hospital ordeal death of her 39 year old daughter Quintanna Roo. In short and merciless order she loses her entire family. The Year of Magical Thinking is written from two exceedingly important points of view not typically brought together for the creation of a book: that of an experienced and deeply talented writer, and that of the in complete flux mind of a person in the trenches of shock and grief. The fact that Mrs. Didion wrote this memoir in bits and pieces and then later, as a whole, during the worst of her grief is important to the final story. The words and sentences on the page are transmitting from the jaws of the dog straight to our reading experience, letting us in on the repetition, delusions, warps of time, denial and teetering horror that is a person in the grips of shock and severe grief. These merge together into a piece of experience expressed so finely, so cleanly and dispassionately, that I was at once completely fascinated and totally in awe.
Of course I went back and read Mrs. Didion's novel on my shelf, and have sense read much more by her. She now has a work out chronicling her daughter's life and loss, written up here in the New York Times. I plan on reading as soon as possible, and look forward to more work from Mrs. Didion. Her life has been fascinating, including a long, loving and productive marriage to the writer John Dunne, screenplays written and movies made, travel, relationships with fascinating writers, actors, politicians, political reporting- Mrs. Didion has lived large. I hope she is finding some safe place in this world without them.
