Didion captures pain of a sudden loss

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 29, 2005

One evening before dinner in December 2003, Joan Didion served her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, a second tumbler of Scotch as he sat in an armchair by the fireplace. She returned to mixing a salad.

When she looked over at him again, he was motionless, his left hand raised. At first she thought he was making a bad joke, then she realized something was wrong.

Dunne had suffered a heart attack and died.

In an understated, considered tone, Didion records the initial serenity of that scene and its tragic ending in “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Her narrative retraces important moments in their 40-year marriage and keeps a poignant refrain running through the book:

“Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.”

This is appropriate not only because of Dunne’s unexpected death but because just days before, they were present when their only daughter, Quintana, was taken to New York’s Beth Israel Hospital in septic shock and placed on life support. (Quintana died this summer.)

Didion manages to capture that fast reversal of fortune and ignites universal feelings about death and loss in a book that is totally without self-pity and yet filled with compassion.

For instance, soon after her husband’s heart attack, she says she felt as if he were still there, watching her, worrying about her. When she accomplished some small task, she imagined him glad that she was able to handle things.

Their marriage was unusually close, since the two writers collaborated on screenplays, edited each other’s work and traveled extensively together. Yet Didion does not gloss over their marital difficulties, which makes the narrative that much more convincing.

Didion records navigating the medical world, reading books on subjects about her daughter’s condition and trying to comprehend phrases that doctors use offhandedly, but which she puzzles over repeatedly.

When a surgeon tells her that it looks as if Quintana will “leave the table,” she tries to decipher the phrase – is it good news or bad? Moments like this fill the narrative, making the story become more than that of a couple. It becomes the account of one woman’s survival of the loss of the person closest to her and how she handles it, and of the human dilemmas that such a loss brings.

The book will resonate in the life of everyone who has experienced pain and grief, but it is more far-reaching than that. Because Didion has written so sympathetically about her situation, the reader cannot help but place himself not only in her shoes, but in her skin – the skin of one who will lose a loved one.

She reviews what Dunne was doing hours before he died, as well as what she will be doing alone from now on in a day-by-day review of her calendar. She examines what her husband has left behind: the magazines by his armchair, the CDs he listened to, the book he was reading and the bookmark. Didion describes this emptiness in prose so specific that its reach is universal.

As an account of marriage and loss, “The Year of Magical Thinking” is both dramatic and understated, and so intense are her feelings for one man and one daughter that Didion manages to represent the whole human condition.