Books |
Joan Didion (1934 – 2021)
By
Published: Dec 23, 2021
Category:
Memoir
Joan Didion died at her home of complications from Parkinson’s. She was 87.
Joan was intensely private, but she allowed her nephew Griffin Dunne to make a documentary, “Joan Didion: The Center Cannot Hold,” that could have only be made by a trusted relative. Griffin was clear that his film was a love letter to “Aunt Joan,” but he didn’t hold back from asking blunt questions about the deaths of her husband and daughter Here’s the glowing Times review. And here’s the Netflix link.
One idea jumped out at me: “The Center Cannot Hold” as the third “book” in Didion’s “grief trilogy.” The first book — about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne — is “The Year of Magical Thinking.” [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.] The second — about the death of her daughter Quintana — is “Blue Nights.” [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, which includes the two Griffin Dunne videos featured below, click here.]
When “The Year of Magical Thinking” was newly published, I wrote about it.
Walking to work, my wife and I used to see them on their morning stroll through Central Park.
The man gave off just the faintest suggestion of “burly” and — at the same time — “frail.”
The woman was a stick figure. Really. From a distance, you could not imagine that her legs could hold a body up, even one as slight as hers. And, if you did not know her, you might think, “Will someone please buy that bulimic a milkshake and make sure she keeps it down?”
Then we’d get closer and say, “Oh,” and we’d keep our distance, although, in fact, we knew them slightly — Joan Didion and John Dunne.
I knew John’s brother Dominick and Nick’s son Griffin much better, and my wife and I were extremely close with their nephew Tony and their niece-by-marriage Rosemary. But, instinctively, I gave the Dunnes space. It always seemed they were having a serious conversation and that the future of Western literature depended on its satisfactory conclusion.
They both wrote at home, they looked over each other’s work, they had dinner together — after decades of marriage, they were inseparable and glad of it. Yes, Joan had MS and John had a bum ticker, but year after year, there they were, getting away with it.
And then their only daughter Quintana took ill. Seriously ill, in-a-coma and near-death ill. And they came home from seeing her in the hospital and John sat down to read and have a Scotch. And then “he stopped talking” and “slumped motionless.” Joan had a card in the kitchen with the phone number of a hospital on it — “in case someone in the building needed an ambulance.” She called. People came. They worked on John and then they took him to the hospital. A man was waiting. He was not wearing scrubs. “I’m your social worker,” he told Joan, and, as she writes, “I guess that is when I must have known.”
Joan Didion is not a rapid writer, but she wrote “The Year of Magical Thinking” quickly, the better to keep her prose fresh and raw. The book is very far from a howl of pain — though she explores the outer limits of grief, Didion is the kind of writer for whom even feeling passes through the brain. Which is to say that, in addition to her grief, we learn all about her thoughts about grief and her research about grief.
She also takes us on a selective tour of her marriage and her family. It’s very idiosyncratic. She does widow things — gives away John’s clothes — but cannot give away his shoes: “He would need shoes if he was to return.” And she does things few widows are asked to do. Like: eighteen days after John has died, her daughter becomes conscious enough to be told her father is gone. Like: Quintana’s condition improves enough for her to go to California, where she steps off the plane and collapses. And Joan rushes to California for the next round of nail-biting worry.
“We try to keep the dead alive,” she writes, “in order to keep them with us.” But you can only go so far with magical thinking. On the last page, just as you hope she will, Joan Didion makes the most modest kind of “progress.” You want to cheer. Then you remember something she didn’t know when she finished this book — on the eve of its publication, Quintana died.
Quintana’s death reminded me of John’s memorial service, which I attended. Afterward, family and friends were gathering for drinks at a club near my home. It had been a long day, and I had not seen much of our daughter, then just two years old. It was my habit to prepare her bath, and read as she played, and, from time to time, chat about this or that. As the cab passed our corner, I suddenly realized that being with our daughter was more important than talking to the New York literary elite. I got out and went upstairs.
Once you have heard the first sentence of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” you know you’ll never forget it: “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” That reminder to pay attention to what’s most precious is an idea you’ve heard before. But when Joan Didion says it, it sticks. I don’t remember what my daughter and I did that evening, but I’m very, very glad we had that time together.
