When writer Joan Didion speaks at the Los Angeles Times Festival
of Books on Saturday, it won’t be the first time she has stepped
foot on UCLA’s campus. But it will be the first time she has
returned since her daughter was hospitalized here for a substantial
length of time at the UCLA Medical Center.
"The spring I was there with Quintana, the Festival of Books
went on one week while I was there, and I have a very clear picture
of worrying that I couldn’t get a parking place and going extra
early to the hospital to ensure I would," Didion said.
"And it was perfectly alright. I was really baffled as to why
there were still parking places."
The time she spent at the medical center was indeed full of
baffling moments, which she chronicles in detail in her latest
work, "The Year of Magical Thinking."
The memoir describes a period in Didion’s life when she grieved
for the sudden, unexpected death of her husband and writer John
Gregory Dunne at the same time that her daughter Quintana was
hospitalized with a mysterious infection that eventually brought
her into septic shock.
"The Year of Magical Thinking" powerfully captures the cycle of
grief and mourning that Didion experienced at that time,
particularly through its fluid structure and immediacy.
"It occurred to me that that was the way to keep it raw, to
replicate the experience. What happens after a death is you keep
going over it in your mind. You keep returning to it, trying to
make it come out differently," she said.
Didion calls attention to the shifts in society that have made
the act of grieving taboo in American culture and attributes this
change to the "medicalization" of death and the denial of
mortality.
"Death became something handled by experts. People died at home
– now they die in ICUs," Didion said.
"None of us want to die or want the people we love to die. We
want to imagine that we can fix this, that we can make it not
happen. It makes us uncomfortable to be around situations in which
it does happen."
At the end of the year narrated in her book, Didion fears that
her memories of her husband will become less immediate and raw.
"That’s one of the things that everyone who loses someone fears
and one of the reasons they don’t want time to pass," Didion
said.
"There’s a level at which you don’t want to get over it. You
want to remain raw. But in the natural course of things you can’t
stay alive and have it remain raw. So it does become more
remote."
In a tragic twist of events, Quintana died six weeks before the
book was published. But Didion chose not to alter "The Year of
Magical Thinking," both for practical and personal reasons.
"It was already bound and in the warehouse, ready to ship," she
said. "But it never entered my mind to hold it back or not to let
it happen because, in a way, I saw that book as grieving for
Quintana, as she was so ill through it, as for John."
Both readers and critics have responded in droves to this work,
propelling it to the best-seller list and bestowing numerous awards
on Didion, including the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize
nomination.
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"It’s a profound and moving book. It’s essentially a long
personal essay," said English Professor Mona Simpson. "Her strength
is really that she’s created her form in the essay, and she’s got
an unmistakable personal, emphatic style in which she writes."
Yet Didion remains remarkably unaffected by success, continuing
to measure each work on a personal scale. She once remarked in an
interview with writer Dave Eggers that the only time she felt truly
successful was when "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz used her
daughter’s name in one of his comics.
"I couldn’t believe it. I felt really blessed," Didion said,
laughing. "With my own work, clearly I have achieved some success
in the world. But yes, you still feel like you could do everything
a little better than you’re doing it, or a whole lot better.
Nothing ever quite gets to where you think it should get."
At the Festival of Books, Didion will appear alongside hundreds
of authors, many of whom look to her for inspiration. But when
asked if she ever compares her work to theirs, Didion responds
emphatically.
"No. I would lose out if I measured myself against other
writers," she said.
Her response conveys her trademark dry humor and wit, which make
a conversation with a literary giant such as Didion down-to-earth
and accessible.
"The thing I particularly love (about Didion) is that she’s
quite ironic and funny, in a quiet, very powerful way," Simpson
said.
One writer in particular Didion looks forward to seeing at the
festival is her old friend, Gay Talese. Both got their start in
journalism writing pieces in a style that later came to be tagged
"New Journalism."
"I never thought New Journalism existed. I just thought it was a
catchphrase that Tom Wolfe invented," Didion said. "What I mean is,
it wasn’t anything particularly new, what all of us in our
different ways were doing."
In her distinct way, Didion made a name for herself as an astute
essayist, capturing the craziness of the ’60s and the paradoxical
nature of California, among many other subjects.
And while Didion said she always knew she wanted to be a writer
(aside from a very brief fascination with acting), her experience
in journalism significantly shaped her inimitable perspective.
"When I started doing pieces, it just opened up a whole new
world to me," she said.
"It was interesting to get out into the world and see things and
try to make sense of them. It was really useful to me because it
forced me to put myself into situations and talk to people who I
normally might not have the opportunity to talk to."
She brought the art of skillful observation and analysis to all
her subsequent works, from nonfiction to novels, up through "The
Year of Magical Thinking," where she reads different theories on
grief from Freud to Emily Post.
While many have asked her how she could continue writing after
her husband’s death, Didion knew she needed to write just to get
through it.
"Writing is really the only way I know how to think. I can’t
think unless I’m actually writing, forcing myself to make the
transition, to make it work," she said. "To me it’s a method of
thinking, and the only one I have."
In one of her early collections of essays, "The White Album,"
Didion mentions Paul Ferguson, who while serving a life sentence
for murder on death row, had taken up writing to help him "reflect
on experience and see what it means."
At the end of the essay, Didion admits that "writing has not yet
helped me to see what it means."
Yet over 30 years later, after enduring the deaths of her
husband and daughter and completing "The Year of Magical Thinking,"
Didion has finally come to understand the meaning of
experience.
"Absolutely," Didion said. "Writing (the book) did enable me to
reflect on experience in a real way."