This is a very very brilliantly written book, terribly sad of course and full of penetrating insights worth hanging onto. I did have to read most of it twice, though, her style is so careful and rather dense, and the occasional sections she quotes from novels make me think they would be too dense and difficult. Also the immediacy of this book is all from its True Experience real-ness. I mention these impressions, because Didion and her husband both wrote novels, and worked extremely hard doing so, it seems, and I imagine took them more seriously than other writing they did, such as their “crash rewrite” of a screenplay that was never made, and the profile of Natalie Wood John Dunne finished shortly before his death, and so on. But apparently he may have felt regret for not devoting his life to something worthier: and I wonder if The Year of Magical Thinking might not be the most powerful thing they both produced. This would be ironic, in the literarily incorrect sense.

Her rational tone is very revealing and wonderful when applied to the mess and disaster of real life. She’s an uphill journalist, going against the grain, not a person who wants to get out there and meet the world at all, but a writer who can’t help experience it. This makes for an amazing kind of unintentional (?) tension.