The Phrases of Grief

It also drew attention to the unusual shape and rhythm of Didion's prose.

"I've been trying for four decades to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours," critic John Leonard wrote recently. The answer is "something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, ice-pick laser beams, or waves."

"There are not many writers of nonfiction who get part of the effect by rhythm," Trillin says. In some hard-to-explain way, this also relates to the knack Didion has shown for "being personal without being personal."

An example:

In "The White Album," she quotes from a psychiatric report generated after she suffered an "attack of vertigo and nausea" in the summer of 1968: "Patient's thematic productions on the Thematic Apperception Test emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her."

How personal can you get? Except that she goes on to mix in reportage on the Black Panther Party, the Doors and the Manson Family murders, and to suggest that "an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response" to the disorienting chaos of the times.

"We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce," is a much-quoted line from another Didion essay, written for Life magazine around the same time. Yet the sentences and paragraphs that follow let you only so far into the threatened marriage, and you never learn what some might consider key emotional facts: that John knew she was writing the piece, edited it, amused Quintana at the Honolulu Zoo while Didion rewrote it, then drove her to the Western Union office so she could send it off.

'The Vortex Effect'

On Dec. 30, 2003, she and John visited Quintana in the hospital, where she lay unconscious, a seeming case of flu having -- as Didion would write in that billboard paragraph -- "exploded into pneumonia and septic shock." They took a cab home. She lit a fire and began to cook. He settled in to read a book about World War I.

She can't remember if that's what he was talking about over dinner, around 9 o'clock, when he suddenly stopped and she looked up to see him slumped in his chair. He had died, at 71, from "a sudden massive coronary event," though she didn't yet know that.

She called for help. Paramedics crashed in and begin their work. Some time later, at the hospital, she heard a social worker reassure the doctor who was about to deliver the bad news.

"It's okay," the social worker said. "She's a pretty cool customer."