The Phrases of Grief

And there was the basic yet unredeemable promise of motherhood, made to Quintana that day they first brought her home: that she would always be taken care of, that she would always be all right.

So much emotion, set down so openly: All this, Didion agrees, is far from her normal mode. Was the experience of writing it different as well?

"It didn't feel like writing," she says. "Writing to me is really hard. And I just sort of sat down and wrote this -- or typed it."

Only later did she realize that it was truly written. This happened after an excerpt got copy-edited and she had to "go back and take the copy editing out to get it to sound like me."

Knopf initially printed 45,000 copies of "The Year of Magical Thinking," but the publisher has had to go back to press seven times; 250,000 copies are now in print. The book is just as polished as Didion's early work, says her editor, Shelly Wanger. But it's "much more raw, much more immediate, much more personal."

It does have an antecedent, though.

Didion's previous book, "Where I Was From," is mostly a reported meditation on California, but it has what Didion calls "memoir aspects." This is especially true of the last section, in which she evokes the aftermath of her mother's death, summing up with a line that seems to foreshadow what was to come:

"There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."

'If I Can Write It Down'

No real way but one, perhaps.

"You think: If I can write it down, I can keep it," Didion says. She's had this feeling more strongly about some books than others. Her first, for one, because she was writing to "re-create home." Her latest, for another.

"I had it very strongly about this book: that I could keep John."

Not surprisingly, she found it hard to end. The problem is there's no resolution: "The conventional way to end something like this is you come to a resolution, right?"

It would be easier if she had faith. But Didion, though she was raised Episcopalian, lacks it.

"To have faith, you have to believe in the face of all evidence to the contrary," she explains. "That has to be the beauty of it and the point of it, but it's a very hard place to reach." She can see the attraction, but has never quite gotten there.

As a child, she was troubled by this. Then she discovered meaning in geology, in "the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains," as she writes near the end of the book. Later, she came to attach equal meaning to "the repeated rituals of domestic life" -- and to the people, of course, with whom those rituals were shared.

This can work. But lose those people, and you're back to square one. Or as Didion writes -- sounding every bit as pessimistic and fatalistic as she was judged to be in 1969 -- you're up against "the void, the very opposite of meaning," and must "confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

She's done that.

The craziness is gone now; she knows her family isn't coming back.

Still, she hasn't discarded her husband's shoes.

She finished "The Year of Magical Thinking" on Dec. 31, 2004, then saw that the ending she'd come up with didn't work. "I had attempted a resolution, but it was false," she says. She spent a week rewriting.

The new ending has to do with a cave on the California coast, into which she and John used to swim when the tide was right, and with something he taught her there. The meaning in those rhythmic sentences comes through quite clearly -- she is withholding nothing here -- but it can't be summarized.

It remains bound up in the sentences themselves.