Rereading Joan Didion’s most recent book, The Year of Magical Thinking (Fourth Estate), on a crowded train into San Francisco on my way to interview the iconic American writer, I find myself fighting back tears. It is an account of Didion’s grief in the wake of her husband’s fatal heart attack in December 2003, just days after their only child, Quintana, slipped into a mysterious coma after a winter flu turned into septic shock.
I had been reading about the hopeful period when Quintana, having been released from hospital in New York in March 2004, flies to Los Angeles with her new husband, Gerry Michael. Didion in her New York apartment imagines Quintana taking him to all her childhood haunts - her high school, their old neighbourhood in Malibu. The page is suffused with love. Then the phone rings: Quintana has collapsed at the airport and is in intensive care again, having suffered bleeding in the brain. In a terrible double-blow for Didion and her son-in-law, whose previous wife also died young, Quintana, 39, died in August this year.
As I put the book away, I realise why I am so uneasy as the interview approaches. The Year of Magical Thinking has received rave reviews across the US (it is currently number two on The New York Times bestseller list), but what the reviewers haven’t said is that it is impossible to read without crying. I had been worrying about upsetting Didion in the interview. There is the added problem that Didion is, by her own admission, inarticulate and prone to not finishing sentences, because, as she recently told the Los Angeles Times, her husband often finished them for her.
In the event, Didion is calmly eloquent as she talks about grief and the loss of her family over the past two years. She once said she wrote as if she had suffered “a small stroke”, her writing room littered with unsatisfactory starts. But her most recent book was completed in a stream-of-consciousness outpouring between October and late December 2004. “I realised that if I was going to write a book it had to be kind of raw. At the end of the first year [after her husband’s death] the experience would become more remote,” she says. “What was astonishing was that nobody had told me about grief. Nobody told me you go a little crazy.”
The Year of Magical Thinking - the title is a nod to her initial belief that her husband might come back to life - is also a magical love song that celebrates both her marriage and her love for her daughter.
Virginia Woolf once wrote, a little wistfully, that death was the only experience she would never observe, but Didion has given us an approximation of what it looks like. One of the curious aspects of the book is the premonition her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, had of his death. (He once asked her to jot down an idea for something he was writing, then said she could use it herself instead.) Didion’s famous detachment must be returning again, because she now feels she may have read too much into such comments: “In fact, if I stop to think about it, he had been talking about death since he was 35,” she says with a laugh.
Interviewing Didion, like reading Didion, is both saddening and uplifting. When I listen to the tape later, I find she laughed about a dozen times during the interview, about everything from the new fashions for cross-dressers to Hong Kong’s “visual poem of buying and selling”.
Her experience has made her critical of contemporary western attitudes towards grief. “Nobody talks about it. It is vaguely shameful to have these uncontrolled and uncontrollable feelings,” she says. “One reason is that death has been medicalised. In a rural society where people die at home, everybody confronts it.”
Didion’s unsentimental, perceptive essays such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and more recent political articles for the New York Review of Books have made her a pre-eminent chronicler of the American narrative of the past 40 years. Her writing has held up a cracked mirror to the US, offering early warnings that the 1960s would end in tears, for example, as would US foreign policy on Central America.
Displaying precisely the awkwardness discussing bereavement that Didion criticises, my questions actually began with California, the subject of Didion’s previous book, Where I Was From (2003), and only later circle back to her most recent work.
Where I Was From has been described as a memoir of growing up in California, but is more a Naipaulian debunking of the myths that form much of our memories of places. California, in Didion’s telling, is not the fabled El Dorado where daring pioneers made their own fortunes, but rather a place that grew fat on federal subsidies for aqueducts, railways and agriculture - more pork-barrel sprint than gold rush.
Didion was born in Sacramento and studied at Berkeley, and I want to know what accounts for what Americans would call her very “tough love” of her native state, a place most of us credit with the wealth-multiplying benefits of the semiconductor and the stock option. “I had a dreamy misconception of California based on the stories I had been told as a child. A lot of these stories didn’t hold up. California was largely funded by the federal government,” she replies. After the 1950s, the pattern continued, Didion says, as the state became the beneficiary of massive investments in the aerospace and defence industry. “It was part of the military-industrial complex.”
Isn’t California home also to unusually nimble start-ups in Silicon Valley? A place that has led the world in everything from our obsession with the internet to yoga and wine? And a state with college campuses that are envied elsewhere? “The University of California, which has been a huge engine for progress, is fighting harder than ever to get itself funded. Public schools are under terrible pressure. There is a surprising selfishness (and refusal) to see the long-term benefits of funding the schools. I think this is Californian; this is a state settled by people who were careless - they had left everything behind.”
This strikes me as historical determinism taken too far, but tea arrives. She has chosen chamomile. I ask her if she would like something to eat. With a wave of the hand, she suggests the olives and wasabi crackers on the table should suffice and then doesn’t touch either. Scarcely 5ft tall, Didion has a tiny frame. The loss of weight prompted by her husband’s death and daughter’s prolonged illness, coupled with her habit of sitting at the edge of a chair, make her seem like a bird about to take flight. She also speaks very softly and soon I am sitting on the edge of my chair, straining to hear her even though the Seasons Lounge is mostly empty at 3.30pm. I am grateful the piano near us is not used in the afternoon.
We move on to talking about the more than 20 years Didion and Dunne spent in Los Angeles. I had read that they made their start working on the remake of the 1954 Judy Garland classic A Star is Born. In fact, they stopped working on the screenplay after disagreements with the studio over the storyline, but still came away with a share of the profits of the film and soundtrack. “We had a very good lawyer,” she says with a smile. “Actually, our first movie was The Panic in Needle Park, which was Al Pacino’s first movie.”
Didion’s career began in New York in the 1960s, writing captions for Vogue. She studied shopping-centre theory, believing quixotically that she needed to own a shopping mall to support herself as a novelist. She and her husband then moved to Los Angeles, initially for six months, but stayed for more than two decades, becoming one of the city’s hottest literary couples before returning to New York in 1988.
Leaving New York had prompted a bittersweet look back in Goodbye to All That, an essay that has such a hypnotic hold on me that when I recently reread it - probably for the tenth time - I was half an hour late for work. On her return, Didion characteristically looked the metropolis square in the eye and labelled it a bit of a fraud. “New York seemed irritating to me in many ways. I thought I didn’t quite understand it,” she says.
Didion wound up writing a 17,000-word opus, first published in 1991, on the Central Park jogger rape case. While the rest of the press pilloried the black suspects arrested and eventually convicted for the crime, Didion coolly asked the larger questions. Why didn’t the forensic evidence add up? Were the pseudo parables of good and evil in the city’s press a distraction from the incompetence and waste in some of its public agencies? And why did a first world-third world divide persist between its inhabitants? “New York had sold itself on a whole lot of sentimental ideas... [such as] the idea that it was a melting pot.” The rape convictions were overturned in 2002, after DNA evidence showed another man had committed the crime.
I close by posing a question I am uncomfortable about asking. Why is she subjecting herself to the rigours of a book tour and interviews? “Obviously I didn’t have to. On the other hand I always do. Particularly after Quintana died, I did not want to not go on doing what I normally do. It wasn’t the right time for me to give way,” she says. “[The book tour] has made me really tired - too tired to reflect on Quintana’s death... straight on, but obviously it’s on my mind.”
Seasons Lounge, Four Seasons, San Francisco
1 x chamomile tea
1 x tea
Total: $13.94
