Look Who's Coming

Joan Didion: National book award winner

On the day before New Year's Eve, 2003, Joan Didion was mixing a salad when her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, slumped at the dinner table and died. The couple had just come home from the hospital, where their only daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was in a coma.

Didion's raw, harrowing memoir "The Year of Magical Thinking" re-creates the following 12 months, when her daughter was released from the hospital, then collapsed at an airport 3,000 miles away and underwent six hours of emergency neurosurgery for bleeding in the brain.

At the same time Didion tended to Quintana, she tried to stay afloat by gingerly avoiding memories of either Quintana or John -- her husband of nearly 40 years-- lest it open a kaleidoscope of memories she couldn't escape. At times, she reverted to "magical thinking," unable to give away all of John's shoes -- in case he needed them when he came back.

She sought solace in medical studies on death, scientific examinations of grief, poetry, plays and even an Emily Post etiquette book. But for all the books on death, she found no appropriate book on grieving.

"The Year of Magical Thinking," then, is the book Didion couldn't find, an unexpected best seller that brings grief into the open -- in all its wracking horror and numbness -- and makes it feel OK not to be OK.

As John Leonard wrote in The New York Review of Books, "I can't imagine dying without this book."

There is a heartbreaking coda: Two months before the book was published, Quintana Michael died of acute pancreatitis at age 39.

On a recent afternoon, Didion spoke by phone from her New York apartment. She will be in Chapel Hill this week for a public reading as UNC-Chapel Hill's 2006 Morgan Writer-in-Residence.

Q - I think anyone who has read this book and knows what happened afterward would have the same first question: How are you doing?

A - (laughs) I'm OK. Sort of OK.

Q - What was it like writing this book without the person who had edited your work for so many years?

A - The first thing I wrote after John died [was] a political piece. That was really hard to write without having John around because it was the first thing I'd written in all these years without his reading it. This book was different, maybe because it wasn't the first thing I'd done, but also because it was like a dialogue with him. I was very aware of what he'd think about it the whole time I was doing it.

Q - And what was that?

A - I thought he would think it was OK, or I wouldn't have been able to finish it.

Q - Did you always know you would write about it?

A - No, I really didn't know I would write about it until I started. I started typing some notes, and I realized I was thinking about how I would structure it. And then I realized, I probably was writing a book.

Q - You also write about not being able to give away John's shoes or take his voice off your answering machine. Is it still there?

A - The voice got taken off the answering machine for me, because I was away during the fall, and the apartment was being painted, and the painter unplugged the answering machine. I never retrieved the voice. Panasonic was brought into this. I had to get, too, a new answering machine and tape a new message. When I learned this had happened ... I thought, "This is not going to be a good thing. This is going to be really hard to deal with." Then I thought, "C'mon, grow up. You can hear his voice on about a million tapes you have."

Q - You've said you thought maybe some older readers would identify with the book, but you didn't anticipate how many people would respond to it. What has it been like? Do you get letters, or have strangers stopped you?