Didion remembers husband in ‘Magical’ book

updated 5:31 p.m. ET Oct. 11, 2005

NEW YORK - Like the novels and essays that made her famous, Joan Didion is sad-eyed, even-voiced and pared to the bone, as if all excess had been burned off by her deep and doubting mind.

The author of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “Play It as It Lays” and other acclaimed books has always looked like someone for whom life was harder than expected, a weary soul endlessly under trial, but her burden has never been greater than over the past couple of years.

She need not leave home to be reminded.

The 70-year-old Didion sat for a recent interview in the same room where her husband and writing partner, John Gregory Dunne, collapsed and died in 2003 of a heart attack. Their daughter, Quintana, was hospitalized at the time with pneumonia and septic shock.

It is all recorded, indelibly, in her new and most personal work, “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Famous for her dissections of cultural matters ranging from hippies and politics to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, Didion has now assembled a narrative out of the chaos of her own grief.

“You know what was odd about the book?” she says during the interview, wearing a long, cream-colored blouse and purple slacks, leaning forward in a small, wicker-backed armchair. “I didn’t think of it as written ... until I saw the copy-edited version.”

Racing her own emotions
At first, the story was untellable. For months, she wrote nothing. After agreeing to cover the 2004 Democratic National Convention, as an assignment for The New York Review of Books, she found herself in tears on the floor of Boston’s Fleet Center and fled in panic.

But once she could concentrate, she worked quickly. Her book about Dunne was a race against the deadline of her own emotions, she says. She finished it over the last three months of 2004, so as not lose a sense of “rawness.”

Her risk has apparently triumphed. Reviewers have been deeply moved, with The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani calling it “an utterly shattering book” and The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley praising its “surpassing clarity and honesty.” Within days of publication, Alfred A. Knopf reprinted “Magical Thinking” five times, for a total of 100,000 copies.

“On the first day it went on sale, it seemed like every third person who came into the store was buying her book,” says Toby Cox, owner of the Three Lives & Company bookstore in New York.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” begins with the death itself, a December night when Dunne was in a living room chair by the fire, drinking Scotch, while Didion was preparing dinner. The two were discussing Scotch, or World War I — Didion doesn’t remember — when he suddenly fell silent and slumped in his chair.

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