This profile of her blew me away. Didion fans – you won’t want to miss it.
She’s a real idol of mine, always has been since I read her essay “Goodbye to all That”. There are essays I go back to again and again – the “White Album” one, the one about the Manson Family and that summer in Los Angeles – her spectacular piece on Patty Hearst … And of course I read her book written in the aftermath of her husband’s death The Year of Magical Thinking. Since her husband died in 2003 – her daughter Quintana (very ill throughout Magical Thinking) died. Quintana was in her 30s. Magical Thinking was barely pleasant to read – and I had to force myself at times to get through it.
The book does not blink. That’s the only way I can describe it. Didion doesn’t blink as she stares at her own grief and tries to write it all down. Breathtaking and awful.
Like I said: she’s an idol.
I am chilled, though, reading that piece. I think about her sometimes, even though I don’t know her. And I wonder: “I know she’s working on the script now … but … how is she doing? How’s she holding up?” I feel really sad. I feel bludgeoned by the grief of a person I do not know.
I loved this, though – I loved it so much:
Who, I ask, were here formative influences? Her answer is surprising. ‘Oh, Hemingway, really. Just Hemingway.’ He seems to have fallen out of fashion, I say. ‘Yes, but nobody writes sentences like Hemingway.
“Oh, Hemingway, really. Just Hemingway.”
Damn. That piece shook me up. It really did.
I love this quote about her marriage to Dunne:
/’Each really understood, marvellously, the value of the other.’/
Beautiful.
Have you read The Year of Magical Thinking, tracey? It’s rough reading – her grief unglossed over – but it is such a good and worthwhile book. You feel her grief so strongly because you get such a sense of their deep partnership.
I loved her recent book too, Sheila, and I read it very quickly.
I’m mad at John Lahr for his bitchy comments about her. I guess I knew he had the bitch streak in him, but I didn’t know he could be quite so judgy and mean. I think that quote–“we tell ourselves stories in order to live”–is actually quite amazing. The more I think about it, the truer it seems.
Kate:
“As in … boom-shaka-laka?”
Exactly. That’s what . . . I. . . got out of it.
Talking about Hemmingway always makes me feel slightly slow… I read Farewell to Arms a few years ago. I didn’t get it. At all. Probably the only book report I ever failed.
Great profile on Didion, and three cheers to you for linking to it. There are few, more painful books one can read than The Year of Magical Thinking. The aura of grief around it is almost tactile, yet it never seems an indulgence. Not many people, I think it’s safe to say, are willing to write as well as she.
red — I want to read it. I’m scared to read it.