The Phrases of Grief

You can almost hear her stepping out from the shadow of those rhythmic sentences:

"This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself."

'Without Being Personal'

She greets you at the door of her Upper East Side apartment, a tiny, pink-sweatered woman of 70 who can't weigh much more than her age. "She doesn't look like she works on the docks" is how her friend Calvin Trillin describes her.

Framed photographs, many of John and their daughter, Quintana, fill flat surfaces in the living room. Neatly squared-off stacks of books lie on the coffee table. One is topped by "The High Sierra," another by "Shadowchild: A Meditation on Love and Loss."

Quintana died in August, after Didion had finished her book. "Many people have said to me: You don't have to promote this," she says, yet "if I didn't do it, it still wouldn't bring her back." She will be in Washington for a reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library at 8 p.m. Friday.

Didion grew up in Sacramento, in California's Central Valley, where her father invested in real estate. Writing started with her mother, she says, "who had been a librarian and had me read a lot." This was before she was in school. "When I was bored or something, when I would whine, she gave me a notebook and said, 'Why not write something?' "

Hers was not a family that encouraged displays of emotion. "This calls for a drink," her father would say whenever such a thing was threatened. Her mother dealt with emotionally charged phone conversations by hanging up. Earlier this month, when her brother handed her a handkerchief at Quintana's memorial service, she began to cry harder than she had before.

"Because it was so sweet, you know?" she says. "We don't usually hand each other handkerchiefs."

Small wonder that she turned into the kind of writer who layered emotional content behind highly burnished prose. In her family, she says, it was "a very daring act" to write publicly at all.

Her first book was "Run River," a California novel she started while working at Vogue, in New York, because she was homesick. More novels would follow, among them "Play It as It Lays" and "A Book of Common Prayer." But it was her early nonfiction, written for a variety of publications and collected in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) and "The White Album" (1979), that made her reputation as a clear-eyed, unsentimental observer of cultural upheaval.

"The center was not holding," she wrote, echoing Yeats, to begin the article that gave her first collection its name. "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" made it nearly impossible to romanticize the Summer of Love -- or the '60s in general -- anymore.