Joan Didion is either a very brave woman or rather a
dreadful one. Both, possibly. To expose your own personal
anguish to a large public by writing a memoir must be
difficult enough; to turn it into a play, and watch large
audiences react not only to your husband’s sudden death but
also to graphic details of your daughter’s lingering and fatal
illness would seem to be unbearable. Finding it hard to
understand the impulse that might have made Didion wish to
expose her tragedies to the public eye, I expected to
dislike the one-woman Broadway production of Didion’s The
Year of Magical Thinking and to find it emotionally
exhibitionistic.

Instead, ably and sometimes beautifully performed by Vanessa
Redgrave, the play struck me as an honest effort on Didion’s
part to communicate her pain and to understand her sometimes
bizarre reactions to the two deaths. Didion describes
herself as a lifelong control freak, someone who believes
however illogically that simply by taking charge and acting
correctly she can make things better. “Must you always be
right? Must you always have the last word?” her husband,
the writer John Gregory Dunne, asked her. Well, yes—until
now, when being right and having the last word make no
difference. So Didion does what most human beings do when
their lives slip out of control: she indulges in magical
thinking. There is a level on which she feels that whatever
had happened, she says, “was open to revision.” If she
repeats certain