I Write to Find Out What I Am Thinking

from the Introduction by Griffin Dunne

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.

Those were among the first words my aunt, Joan Didion, wrote when she finally returned to her desk on May 20, 2004, after the sudden death, by heart attack, of her beloved husband of thirty-nine years, John Gregory Dunne on December 30, 2003. They are also the words that open The Year of Magical Thinking.

There had been signs, early indications of impending catastrophe, a dog whistle that John would not live out the year, that even Joan, after decades of marriage, was not attuned to hear.

John had ongoing issues with his “ticker,” as he called his heart. He had undergone a procedure in the late 80s for a weak artery and more recently he’d had a pacemaker implanted (a “widow maker,” John delighted in quoting his cardiologist). But it was his state of mind in his last days, filled with dread and doom, that Joan didn’t take as warning that her husband had an appointment in Samarra.

“I tell you that I shall not live two days.” Joan repeats this line of Sir Gawain’s in growing self-flagellation, and with every incantation her cat-o’-nine-tails cuts deeper, as if punishment for ignoring what then seemed obvious while writing The Year of Magical Thinking.

“I don’t think I’m up for this,” John said to Joan on their way home from seeing their only daughter Quintana in the ICU of Beth Israel North, where at that moment she was fighting for her life.

“You don’t get a choice,” Joan replied.

Everything he had done had been worthless, John said hopelessly to Joan the night he died or the night before. His current piece in The New York Review of Books—about Gavin Lambert’s biography of Natalie Wood—was worthless, he said. He didn’t know what he was even doing in New York. “Why did I waste time on a piece about Natalie Wood?” he said, perhaps sensing the precious hours he had left.

“This might not be normal,” wrote Joan later, about those hours, “but neither was it normal for a father to see a child beyond his help.”

There were other signs Joan would later remember: how John said, either three or twenty-seven hours before he died, that detail she didn’t recall, “You were right about Hawaii.”

Was he talking about that time in the 70s when she wanted to buy a house in Honolulu, and he didn’t? What was driving this sudden regret?

This is one of many memories that haunted Joan that year. And as a journalist, she felt compelled to document her loss, not to make sense to the reader, but to herself, so she might understand how grief could toy with her imagination to the point where she could magically believe that at any moment John might walk through the door after his morning stroll in Central Park.

“See enough and write it down,” Joan noted in her essay, “On Keeping a Notebook.”

“In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood,” she writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, thirty-six years later. “Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.”

She explored her grief in a submersible built for one, diving into the journal of C. S. Lewis, pulling quotes from Freud, finding passages in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, always looking, but never finding anyone who could articulate what she was feeling.

Describing the journey of her grief in my documentary about Joan called The Center Will Not Hold, she said, “The reason I had to write it down, is that no one had ever told me what it was like.”

“It’s the first book about grief not by a believer,” the playwright David Hare correctly points out later in the film.

And who thought that journey would become a bestseller, let alone win the National Book Award or be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Didion was no stranger to bestseller lists, but no one anticipated the sheer volume of sales of The Year of Magical Thinking, or the months it would remain aloft.

I was on a movie set almost six months after the book’s release. Joan was still on the bestseller list. I noticed a young actress I was working with, nineteen or twenty years old at the most, rush back to her chair and her copy of The Year of Magical Thinking. When we wrapped for the day, I casually asked what she thought of the book.

“She’s incredible, this lady. My grandmother died last year and I can’t talk to anybody about it.” The young actress stopped to look at the book in her hands, gently running a finger over Joan’s name. “Nobody gets it . . . but she does.” When she asked me if I’d ever read it, I nodded and offered nothing more, not wanting to break the spell by telling her of my relationship to the author.

“Do you know,” she began, her face a picture of wonder, “if she has ever written anything else before?”

That’s the thing about this book. Until Magical Thinking Joan had never had such an enormous audience. More importantly, she hadn’t had an audience that was as young and hungry to discover all she had written before Magical Thinking.

Joan was suddenly next-level famous. It wasn’t unusual for people to stop me in airports or coffee shops to say in halting voices how much Magical Thinking meant to them, that my aunt helped them get over, understand, and accept the loss of their parent, child, or sibling. They somehow knew of my family connection, and by connecting with me could finally express their debt to Joan, even if indirectly.

Every time I shared these encounters with her, Joan would look at me with an expression somewhere between bafflement and wariness. She was not the kind of person to embrace flattery, at least not on the outside, but I suspect that beneath her unreadable and sometimes intimidating expression lived a quiet amazement that her words had brought comfort to so many.

The one wound Joan couldn’t heal was her own. No amount of magical thinking could distract her from the cold fact that she had outlived first her husband and then, unimaginably, her daughter. This is the story she tells in Blue Nights. Quintana is still alive in Magical Thinking, though just barely. She suffered a brain injury from a fall at LAX two days after John’s funeral. She’d planned to return to Malibu with her newlywed husband, Gerry Michael, to relive the happiest moments of her childhood where her parents had raised her. The brain injury led to complications, each one more dire, until finally, on August 26, 2005, Quintana Roo Dunne died at the age of thirty-nine. Once again, Joan wrote to understand her feelings, but this time, for her next and last book, Blue Nights, she wrote to face the unthinkable.

“I very nearly didn’t finish it,” she once told me, nervously twirling John’s wedding ring on a delicate gold chain around her neck, “but I went on.”

Her closest friends were dismayed when they read the galley. Earl McGrath, to whom she dedicated South and West, also in this Everyman collection, said to me that he told Joan to her face that he “hated” Blue Nights. I asked why he would say such a thing.

“Because I love her, and she loved Quintana and was a great mother who didn’t deserve the pain she put herself through to write it.”

Joan is very tough on herself in Blue Nights, and for anyone who loved her, it was—and is—painful to read. She confronts her mortality—she was no longer afraid to die—and her failing health. She relives happy memories of Quintana as a child running on the beach and the blissful day of her wedding to Gerry at St. John the Divine.

“On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way,” Joan writes, but with the caveat: “Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as ‘ordinary blessings.’”

Other memories accompany the guilt and regret: at the age of five her daughter called Camarillo Mental Institution to ask what she needed to do if she was going crazy. While examining a childhood photo of Quintana, Joan notices the then-unnoticed signs of melancholia, which prompt brutal introspection:

How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?
Was I the problem? Was I always the problem?

For Blue Nights, she volunteered for a mission no one asked her to undertake. Rereading the book to write this introduction, I can feel the toll each sentence took on her and the almost Sisyphean struggle it must have been to finish it. She did it for Q. She did it for herself. She did it because as a child of the West, she was raised with the frontier ethic that you don’t leave the dead behind.