Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking' forced the writer to begin to deal with the pain of losing her husband and daughter, writes Belinda McKeonin New York
THE APARTMENT is as you'd expect. Books are everywhere - on the tables, on the ottomans, on the shelves around the pale, high walls - and where there are no books there are photographs; silver-framed family snapshots, tinted now with an intense melancholy. That autumn afternoon by Bethesda Fountain in Central Park is in the distant past now, as is that evening on a Malibu deck overlooking the ocean, as is that wedding day at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine.
Some 30 years may separate the first two scenes and the last one, which was captured five years ago as the only child of the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne came smiling from the altar with her new husband, but it makes no difference; the more recent happinesses are as irrevocably vanished as those from decades ago. Joan Didion lives her days surrounded by such lost moments with the dead.
This is the apartment familiar from Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, the apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side to which Didion and her husband, Dunne, returned on an evening in December, 2003, having visited their 37-year-old daughter Quintana in the ICU unit of a city hospital.
This is the apartment in which Didion had built a fire and made dinner and poured a Scotch for Dunne. There's the fireplace, over there, by which Dunne sat as he waited for dinner, reading a book about the first World War.
There's the table in the living room at which they sat, at which Dunne began to drink a second glass of Scotch, at which Didion mixed the salad and listened to him talking about the war and the whisky, and at which Didion looked up, suddenly, because Dunne had gone silent, to find him slumped, motionless, with one hand in the air. There's the floor where the paramedics stretched him. There's where they must have set up their equipment. There's the door through which, maybe two hours later, his widow returned, alone. Life changes fast, that widow typed into a new Microsoft Word document soon afterwards.
Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. There's the question of self-pity, and then there's the question of being incredibly hard on the self; Didion was in the first days of grief, and already she was accusing herself of a failing, of a foible which her journalism and her fiction had for 40 years pursued and interrogated relentlessly, unblinkingly, in others along with other indulgences of the self. But Didion wrote those four lines, and the book that grew out of them, for the same reason she has written every one of her five novels and seven books of journalism: to understand. To understand what had happened, and what had happened to the self she had, up to that point, been; to understand who she was without her husband of 39 years, without the man with whom she had lived and collaborated, the man who had finished her sentences, the man with whom, from the beginning of her marriage, she spent so many hours of every day that her mother and aunt had warned: "For better or worse, but never for lunch."
The memoir was devastating, it was disciplined, it was a study of sorrow at once painterly and scholarly, a study of a life and a mind transformed. It traced the lineaments of a terrible year; and, as soon as it was published, Didion found herself at the beginning of another terrible year. Or rather, she found that the terribleness had metastasised and multiplied; that her magical thinking could not quite be at an end.
QUINTANA, THE DAUGHTER with whose serious illness the memoir began, and whose alternately worsening and improving condition accompanied Didion through the labyrinth of that first year, died in August 2005, just a month shy of the memoir's publication. In the book, Quintana was ill but still alive, and her mother was hopeful; in the interviews and photo shoots which took place that autumn to publicise the book, Didion looked and sounded almost close to death herself, haunted and fragile and broken by her loss.
"In fact, you see, I'm not leaving anybody behind," she told a radio interviewer by way of explaining why she was no longer afraid of dying; she stared from the pages of the New York Times Magazine in photographs by Eugene Richards which unsettled all who saw them, which presented a woman impossibly thin and lost-looking, her huge eyes hung with grief.
This was the woman Scott Rudin, the film and theatre producer, approached two months later, with the idea of making from her memoir a work for the stage. They would want her to adapt her memoir - to write, for the first time in her life, a script for theatre, in this case monologue from her own perspective - and they would want her to incorporate into it the fact and the reality of Quintana's death.
Didion took the call, thought the idea over for a few days, and said yes. What reeled her in, she says, was precisely the enormous challenge with which the proposal confronted her. A medium in which she had no background, a loss about which she had not yet been able to bring herself to write, and the prospect of leaving her building, of putting herself back out into the city, back among people; Didion did not know if she could do it. So she put herself in the position where she had no choice. "It seemed dramatically time to do something that I had never done before and that I doubted I could do. And also it was set up in such a way by Scott that there was very little reason not to do it. I mean, I did not have to go through a lot of humiliating experiences. Before I knew what happened, really, David Hare was here, and we had the Booth Theatre. As a way of trying something new, it was pretty ideal."
Didion drew strength from the months which followed, when she worked with Rudin, with the director David Hare and with her long-time friend Vanessa Redgrave, who was quickly cast as Didion's character, to get the play ready for its March 2007 opening night on Broadway (it has since toured to the National in London, to Salzberg in Austria, and this month comes to Dublin).
The process forced her to work through Quintana's death, through what she describes as the death of a family. "It was like a therapeutic experience in which my therapists were Scott and David and Vanessa," she says, laughing a little. "I mean, it was odd. And it worked somehow."
The physical fragility so striking in those 2005 photographs is still in evidence; Didion is thin and tiny of frame, and still looks drawn and weary - and wary - which may be in part down to a virus which incapacitated her for months last year. But she is open and friendly, and laughs often, in a nervy, apologetic sort of way, at things she finds herself saying.
Always a major figure on the American literary scene, she has become, since the memoir and the play of the same name, a public figure of a different kind, a sort of walking symbol of widowhood, a spokeswoman for sorrow; people approach her in the street to sympathise with her on her losses, to tell her about their own. She's moved by this, but also not a little bemused. "It's kind of odd to have people looking at you," she laughs, "when you're just walking around your neighbourhood in your dirty shorts, you know?"
Watching Redgrave take on both her character and her circumstances has, says Didion, brought her to a deeper and a different understanding of what it is she has gone through. A scene which Redgrave played particularly powerfully - a quiet scene, in which Didion walks on airport tarmac and thinks about the gravely ill daughter she is flying from LA to New York - made her realise, she says, that she had not yet let go of the notion of control, much as she had forced herself, in the writing of the memoir, to confront her own obsession with such control.
She describes herself as having been "as crazy as a loon" during the year following Dunne's death; the "magical" part of her thinking relates to her belief, against all reason, that he was going to return from the dead and that their life together was going to take up where it had left off. She could not get rid of his shoes; he would need them to return.
Five years on, she has at least gotten rid of the idea that she can wrest reality into a shape of her own desiring. Quintana's death, but also the process of making the play, have taught her new lessons in that regard. "I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss," she says, "but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part, y'know. I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control." She laughs. "That's the new control."
The one downside of creating the play, for Didion, was that it had to come to an end, and the end of that process brought with it, for her, fresh feelings of loss and of a kind of grief. "The night the play closed, last August in New York, Vanessa and I both cried onstage," she says. And then she corrects herself: "I mean, not in front of the audience. I mean backstage." Joan Didion doesn't cry in front of an audience, it seems.
With that project now over, and with the play journeying off on a life of its own, Didion is, she says, "playing catch-up" on other writing. The need for catch-up comes partly from the fact that she was ill last year, partly from the fact of her getting older (she'll turn 74 in December) and partly because she still hasn't gotten used to her radically changed life.
"I don't think I've totally grabbed hold of a new way of being, you know," she says. "I'm kind of going along as a survivor, which is okay, but on the other hand, I would like to . . . I always seem a little bit behind. Behind on work and in obligations."
ONE AREA FROM WHICH Didion's voice has been notably absent recently is that of political reportage; an election year is not the same without a Didion essay on the smoke and mirrors of the conventions, on the spin and sham and schadenfreude of the speeches and the press calls and the photo opportunities. She has always had a radar for the insincere word, for the use of language to trick rather than to tell (a phenomenon not limited to public life, as she discovered as she crafted Redgrave's character for The Year of Magical Thinking) and from that radar have come brilliant, wry pieces like Insider Baseball (1988) and Clinton Agonistes (1998).
What would she have made, this past month, of the Obama daughters storming the stage, of Team Clinton, of the return of Ted Kennedy, of Bristol Palin and her gum-chomping fiance, of Sarah Palin and her teleprompter, of Giuliani, of Romney, of the $300,000-clad Cindy McCain? "I just couldn't roll that stone up the hill," she says, "this year. I mean, I follow it. But it doesn't seem to be going in a dramatically different direction than any other election. They're all the same. They're all exactly the same."
• The Year of Magical Thinking is at the Gaiety Theatre from Sept 30-Oct 4 as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival