Following the death of her husband, Joan Didion spent a year paralysed by grief. But there was only one way to lift the despair, she tells Emma Brockes.
On a snowy afternoon in Manhattan I visit Joan Didion, whose apartment seems as white as the outside world and she a bleached figure within it.
It is almost two years since her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died, four months since the death of their daughter Quintana, and Didion, who has always been slight, is at 71 almost ghostly. This is her traditional camouflage, and even now the frailty is misleading.
As her new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, demonstrates, after a period of derangement, Didion turned to face her grief and asked - as she has been asking with force all her life - can I write this down?
Didion is an essayist, a screenwriter and a novelist, but it is her journalism that she will be remembered for, particularly that of the 1960s. She has always mocked her unsuitability for the job, a sly sort of mockery since it is precisely her ability to self-criticise, to track a mood - either personal or cultural - that makes her writing so powerful. In the preface to her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she confessed, in an amused sort of way, to being brittle, inarticulate, afraid of the telephone, diffident, self-effacing, runt-ish and "bad at interviewing people". In her collection The White Album, 10 years later, she wrote of being so plagued by migraines that without medication she would be functional just one day in four.
The combination of her physical frailty and juggernaut intellect has acted as a kind of structural irony that informs all her work, and provided a sense of "outsidership" she revels in as much as resents. While many of her journalistic peers got carried away in the 1960s, Didion wrote with a cool head in accordance with the principle that the lower the temperature of her prose, the higher the emotional voltage it could carry. Her self-possession is such that the mere act of breathing in her presence feels like a vulgar transgression.
The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's 13th book. She didn't start writing it until 10 months after John's death. He died of a heart attack as the couple sat down to dinner in their apartment, and while Quintana, their only child, was in intensive care with pneumonia and septic shock. In the book, Didion takes on the American way of grief, which she sees as evasiveness posing as courage. "The question of self-pity" is a motif that runs through it, as she struggles to find a level acceptable to herself. She smiles bitterly. "There is no level that is acceptable to the world outside."
John Dunne died more or less instantly, and 18 months later, after making a partial recovery, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis, at the age of 39. That was in August. Quintana's funeral was in October. It seems unthinkable Didion could write against this background, let alone do a book tour, which she has just finished. "Well there was nothing else to do," she says. "I had to write my way out of it. Because I couldn't figure out what was going on. By the time I started it - John died December 30th, I didn't start writing until October - I was out of the phase where I didn't know I was crazy. I was still crazy, but I knew it. So, it was a step back."
This craziness is what she means by the magical thinking of the title; that is, such idiosyncrasies of grief as keeping John's shoes because he would need them when he "came back", or driving miles out of her way to avoid places that might trigger a memory. When Didion was eventually able to resume monitoring her own reaction to things, she was amazed by how far from her rational self she had drifted. I wonder if, in this context, she regarded the return to self-analysis as an unwelcome retreat from the immediacy of loss, from the "real" business of grieving.
"No, because I've got no other way of understanding it. I don't really get things very . . . intuitively. I mean I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down."
She says, "I can remember when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing." She laughs. "And it was true. He said, 'You can't be thinking nothing'. And I was."
After John's death there were very few people she wanted to talk to, because there were very few who didn't "panic" when the subject came up.
I suspect that polite society's intolerance of grief is a reaction to the Jerry Springer outpourings at the other end. "I think that's part of it, yeah. It's very easy to deride it. But the other thing is that we simply don't want to deal with death . . . Until the 1930s, people died at home; I mean even in my childhood in the 1940s and early 1950s people you knew had elderly aunts who were dying upstairs. People were taken care of at home. They really aren't now."
When Quintana was in hospital, Didion did what she always does under pressure - she turned to the facts. She took out library books on brain surgery; she investigated the drug options. She even considered buying scrubs to wear to the hospital, before realising she was alienating the medical staff. She made what she thought were purely practical notes, until, reading them back, she saw that she had written about other things too; this was the starting point of the book.
When Quintana died, she stopped writing. "I'm going through this process twice now. It's a different process, because the relationship to a child is at once more fundamental and less intimate. Because a grown child has his or her own life and isn't part of your daily life. And you might talk on the phone once a day, but that's not every breath you take. Which someone you live with is."
This was particularly true in the case of Joan and John, who worked together as a "cottage industry", as she puts it, collaborating on screenplays, never competing because "what benefited one, benefited the other". The Year of Magical Thinking was the first thing Didion had written for 40 years that John had not read first and remarked upon. She didn't want to finish it, because "it maintained a connection with him".
The book tour was helpfully numbing in the weeks after Quintana's death. Going on the road is a Didion family tradition, stretching back to the frontiersmen and women she is descended from. But now she is home and braced for the onslaught.
"I found after Quintana died that this was particularly difficult for people to deal with. They didn't want to think about the possibility of their own children dying. I started feeling really kind of embarrassed, as if I was contagious."
When John died, Didion saw signs everywhere, small daily occurrences that became loaded with special meaning. She hasn't "let" that happen this time. "Because I had to pull together." She looks away, out of the window, at the bone-white world. "We'll see what happens in the spring."
In her early 30s, Didion was already writing about her 20s as if from a great distance, her tone elegiac, her attitude a strange combination of detached and romantic. "That is what it was all about, wasn't it? Promises?" she wrote wistfully in the essay Goodbye To All That, as she examined the despair of getting older and discovering what mattered.
In 1972, in an essay on the women's movement, she wrote that being female turned on "a dark involvement with blood and birth and death" that even her friend Nora Ephron rolled her eyes at - a real Ingmar Bergman moment - and called in a rival essay that year "extraordinary and puzzling". Read too much Didion in one sitting and you are liable to find yourself cruising the aisles at Sainsbury, staring hammily into the middle distance and thinking, with only the remotest idea of what it means, that is what it was all about, wasn't it? Promises?
The basis of Didion's self-mythologising, and her sensitivity to the mythologising of her country, was aCalifornian childhood and a lineage going back to the first wagons to hit the territory. After spending years in Sacramento, Didion's father, an army finance officer, moved the family around, but Didion thought of herself as pure Californian: individualist, resistant to group mentalities, "awkward" in the sense of not wanting to join in. She made notes as a child and was often miserable.
When she was about four, her mother took her to see a paediatrician who told her that she would "probably have to do something where I could express myself, otherwise I would just continue crying and screaming". Where did her anxieties come from? Didion says she doesn't know. She smiles. "My mother, my father and World War two."
At 21, after graduating from Berkeley, she won an internship at Vogue, a position occupied a few years earlier by Sylvia Plath. Didion moved to New York where she met John, younger brother of Hollywood producer Dominick Dunne, and they married. Shortly afterwards, when her first novel was well received, Didion resigned from Vogue and the couple headed west to start a new life as freelancers. She was hired by various mass-circulation magazines to cover the hippy culture of the 1960s and interview its heroes - Joan Baez, Michael Laski, and the occasional hero of her own, such as John Wayne.
The essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which gave its name to the anthology, was the fruit of weeks of hanging out with the runaways and dropouts of the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco.
I ask if it felt like career-making stuff as she wrote it. "No. I was paying the rent. It wasn't until Henry Robbins, who was my editor at Farrar Straus, wanted to bring out a collection of pieces . . . I thought it was a terrible idea because I thought they would all be repetitive." But she did put them together, "and it was sort of well-received".
Later, her writing became more political. As a young woman she had voted Republican, "because my family did", but she became, broadly speaking, a Democrat, although she was inconsistent; now, she says, she finds both parties "disgusting". In 1972, she wrote an essay pointing out the absurdities of the women's movement, as did Ephron; but while the latter fretted about being disloyal to the sisterhood, Didion had no qualms.
"There was a lot of negative reaction [ to the essay] and I was kind of surprised at the way that flak continued, over the years. It seemed to me that I was saying a fairly simple thing, which was that the women's movement had taken a wrong turn, not that it was not a worthwhile thing; but that it was headed for implosion." She smiles. "But that was not a positive message."
She was equally critical of political reporting, the "insider" mentality she summarised, with knife-like acuity, in her coverage of the 1988 presidential race: American reporters, she wrote, like to cover a campaign because "it has balloons".
She and John were, however, Hollywood insiders and enjoyed it immensely. Their most notable screenplays were the 1976 remake of A Star is Born and Up Close & Personal, starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.
It is hard to imagine Didion putting up with the interference, the group editing, the sheer hassle of getting a script through to production, but she says it was fun and a sociable contrast to her other work. Film producers who worked with the couple were amazed when they argued, as no other scriptwriters ever did, for more line cuts; precision, as ever, was all.
Didion says she departed a little from her earlier style in The year of Magical Thinking,. It was necessary because of the subject matter. "I wanted it to be really raw . . . I didn't want it to be as concealed as my style usually is."
It is a style defined by her use of irony. In 2002, she discussed this in an address at the New York Public Library, following September 11th, when it was fashionable for a while to announce the death of irony. Didion argued against it. Used properly, irony is not a mannerism, or a smirk, but a function of history and as such a useful response to September 11th, the gravity of which, she said, "derived specifically from its designed implosion of historical ironies".
In relation to her own writing style she says: "It's a way of expressing disappointment, disapproval . . . It's another one of those concealing devices." Why does concealing something heighten its impact? "It's like dressing. If you're covered up, it's sexier than if you're not."
Didion's writing has never felt effortless; you can see the sweat. And it has never grown easier; she will, typically, spend "most of the day working on a piece - not actually putting anything on paper, just sitting there, trying to form a coherent idea and then maybe something will come to me about five in the afternoon and then I'll work for a couple of hours and get three or four sentences, maybe a paragraph."
And so, she will wait to see what happens in the spring. As I leave, the pressure not to say something gets too great and in a weird doorstep outburst I tell her that she is, you know, an inspiration. Kind of. She looks alarmed.
"Oh."
I mumble the word "icon".
"Oh."
And I bundle out of the apartment as Didion looks blank and shuts the door.
The Year of Magical Thinking is published by Fourth Estate