Loss and Longing in New York

This is Didion’s inconspicuously inserted clue that this is not a sentimental, I-overcame-it sort of memoir, that confessional sort of stuff that wins automatic selection on Oprah’s book club. Didion’s fiction has always pledged allegiance to irony. In her spare and careful prose, she very imperceptibly splits and steps away from herself, making her person both a vehicle for the narrative and a subject for self-observation.

The magic of the title is shorthand for the unreality of death, the residual layers of grief that must be carefully peeled away to know that it is an irreversible event — that if she held tight to John’s clothes and shoes, if she resolutely glanced away from the obituaries, he’d come back. It is done by writing, and then rewriting many times, its chronology. It also involves slowly wheeling back in time and wondering at the premonitions of death.

In all of this, Didion finds anchor in the literature of grief and mourning. She goes through volumes of psychoanalysis, of Emily Post’s advice on the etiquette of mourning. She goes to the poets. She studies the history of medicine. She even learns how dolphins deal with all this. She utilises this scaffolding to find the confidence to explore her own experience and attempt to explain society’s growing intolerance of the rituals of grieving. This again is a pointer to Didion’s coastal — she of Californian and New York residency — literary tradition: “In times of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.”

This, then, is a book of finding identity in changed personal circumstances. Writes Didion: “People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognisable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.”

This is an uncomfortable book to tackle, one that would have been so effortless to slot if it were simply cloaked as fiction. In fiction, it is just another day’s reading to learn of a journey to visibility and thence to a renegotiation with one’s environment and political culture. Didion’s re-acquaintance with the America of the early 2000s — her treks to the Democratic and Republican conventions of 2004, for instance — keeps the reader slightly suspicious. Suspicious whether she is taking advantage of her bereavement to win unconditional sympathy. It is, in the end, a measure of Didion’s exceptional writing that that suspicion slowly fades away.