The Phrases of Grief

"It was the most amazing thing to be told that, to hear that," Didion says, correcting herself for the sake of precision, as she often does, and laughing, a minute later, at the fact that -- while she was certainly not feeling cool -- she also remembers "being glad that he approved of my behavior."

In "The Year of Magical Thinking," she revisits Dec. 30 again and again, adding detail: about talking to one of Quintana's doctors that evening ("We're still not sure which way this is going," he said), about needing to believe that John had died right away (because otherwise, why hadn't she done more to save him?).

And she turns the idea of the cool customer into a running joke, because it stands in such contrast to who, beneath that polished surface, she actually was.

She was a woman, after all, who could not throw out the last of her husband's shoes -- because she thought he would need them when he came back. "I was thinking as small children think," she writes, "as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."

Cool customers aren't supposed to say such things out loud.

When Dunne died, Didion was under contract to write a book about the Kobe Bryant case. She dropped it. It no longer interested her, she was feeling too crazy -- and most important, she still had her daughter to worry about.

By spring 2004, Quintana seemed to have won her battle for survival. On March 23 she spoke at her father's memorial service, which Didion had postponed until her daughter was strong enough to come. Two days later, Quintana and her husband flew to Los Angeles. Coming out of the terminal, she collapsed. The next thing her mother knew, she was having emergency neurosurgery, once again near death.

Didion flew west and stayed five weeks. She narrates this harrowing crisis over about 50 pages in the middle of "The Year of Magical Thinking." But there's more than a medical drama going on here. Also woven through these pages -- and through the rest of the book, as well -- is a series of vignettes that add up to a portrait of a marriage.

To see how these work, you need to understand what Didion calls "the vortex effect." By this she means the ever-present danger -- as she drove, for example, the Southern California streets near where she and John and Quintana once lived -- that she could be pulled toward memories too painful to bear.

It's tempting to see the vortex effect as a structural device, a deliberate way to work in chunks of family memoir, but Didion says she never thought of it that way. She was trying to be true to her experience, and at that time, her world was filled with emotional land mines.

She avoided Malibu, her old neighborhood in Brentwood and even a favorite AM radio station, only to be ambushed by the televised image of a bit of coastal highway. This took her back to 1966, when she and John adopted Quintana, brought her home and "placed her bassinet next to the wisteria in the box garden."

Memories kept emerging, recurring. There was that last trip to Paris, on which they skipped the Monets to go to lunch. There was John, rereading first one novel then another, to see how they worked. There were the infrequent times she drove the car while he was in it, and the more frequent times they fought.