Word: didion
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...