Joan Didion Explores Grief

Posted on October 31, 2005

Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking has struck a nerve. With 250,000 copies now in print, the book is the story of a year in which her daughter was stricken with an inexplicable, life-threatening illness and her husband of nearly 40 years suddenly died at the dinner table. Bob Thompson of The Washington Post has an interesting feature about Ms. Didion and her work. He discusses her use of what her husband (a writer) called the "billboard" and why it's important in a book.

Didion never writes from outlines. She knew the book would end a year after her husband's death. She sensed that an especially intense crisis in her daughter's illness would form a "movement" that should fall a certain distance into the narrative. Otherwise she didn't plan. She just wrote.
Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was a writer as well. Over the years, he had drilled into her the need to include a so-called billboard section: a short passage, early on, that tells readers what you're writing about. At the beginning of Didion's career, she had sometimes neglected to do this. On that first writing day, when she got to the place where the billboard should fall, she typed one in.
This was her effort, she explained, to make sense of the disorienting months after her husband died and their daughter fell ill, a period "that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." It was a classic billboard, a billboard to make John proud....

It's an interesting and disturbing story that Ms. Didion tells, that has resonated with many readers.