| (no subject) |
[Oct. 4th, 2005|02:40 am] |
The End of Life as She Knew It
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: October 4, 2005
In Joan Didion's work, there has always been a fascination with what she once called "the unspeakable peril of the everyday" - the coyotes by the interstate, the snakes in the playpen, the fires and Santa Ana winds of California. In the past, that peril often seemed metaphorical, a product of a theatrical imagination and a sensibility attuned to the emotional and existential fault lines running beneath society's glossy veneer: it was personal but it was also abstract.
There is nothing remotely abstract about what has happened to Ms. Didion in the last two years.
On Christmas Day 2003, her daughter Quintana, who had come down with flulike symptoms, went to the emergency room at Beth Israel North hospital in New York City. Suffering from pneumonia and septic shock, she was suddenly in the hospital's intensive-care unit, hooked up to a respirator and being given a potent intravenous drug cocktail.
Five days later, Ms. Didion's husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, sat down to dinner in their Manhattan apartment, then abruptly slumped over and fell to the floor. He was pronounced dead - of a massive heart attack - later that evening.
"The Broken Man," what Quintana as a young girl used to call "fear and death and the unknown," had come for her father, even as it had come to wait for her in the I.C.U.
"Life changes fast," Ms. Didion would write a day or two later. "Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."
Like those who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, like those who have lost friends and family members to car accidents, airplane crashes and other random acts of history, Ms. Didion instantly saw ordinary life morph into a nightmare. She saw a shared existence with shared rituals and shared routines shatter into a million irretrievable pieces.
In her devastating new book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," Ms. Didion writes about the year she spent trying to come to terms with what happened that terrible December, a year she says 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."
Throughout their careers, Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne wrote about themselves, about their marriage, their nervous breakdowns, the screenplays they worked on together and the glittering worlds they inhabited in New York and Los Angeles. Writing for both of them was a way to find out what they thought; the construction of a narrative was a means of imposing a pattern on the chaos of life.
And so, almost a year after the twin calamities of December 2003, Ms. Didion began writing this volume. It is an utterly shattering book that gives the reader an indelible portrait of loss and grief and sorrow, all chronicled in minute detail with the author's unwavering, reportorial eye. It is also a book that provides a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage, an extraordinarily close relationship between two writers, who both worked at home and who kept each other company almost 24 hours a day, editing each other's work, completing and counterpointing each other's thoughts.
"I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him," Ms. Didion writes. "This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response."
Like so many of her fictional heroines, Ms. Didion says she always prized control as a means of lending life at least the illusion of order, and in an effort to cope with what happened to her husband and daughter, she turned to the Internet and to books. "Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature," she writes. "Information is control." She queried doctors, researched the subjects of grief and death, read everything from Emily Post on funeral etiquette to Philippe Ariès's "Western Attitudes Toward Death."
When Quintana suffered a relapse in March 2004 - she collapsed at the Los Angeles airport and underwent emergency neurosurgery at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center for a massive hematoma in her brain - Ms. Didion began researching the doctors' findings. She skimmed the appendices to a book called "Clinical Neuroanatomy" and studied "Intensive Care: A Doctor's Journal" in an effort to learn what questions to ask Quintana's doctors.
During those weeks at U.C.L.A., Ms. Didion says she realized that many of her friends in New York and California "shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful": "They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice." For many years, she shared those beliefs, and yet at the same time she says she always understood that "some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them" and that "some events would just happen. This was one of those events."
Nor could she control her own thoughts. Try as she might to suppress them, memories of her life with Mr. Dunne - of trips they had taken with Quintana to Hawaii, of homes they had lived in Los Angeles and Manhattan, of walks and meals shared - continually bobbed to the surface of her mind, creating a memory "vortex" that pulled her back in time only to remind her of all that she had lost. She began trying to avoid places she might associate with her husband or daughter.
The magical thinking of denial became Ms. Didion's companion. She found herself "thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome." She authorized an autopsy of her husband, reasoning that an autopsy could show what had gone wrong, and if it were something simple - a change in medication, say, or the resetting of a pacemaker - "they might still be able to fix it."
She similarly refused to give away his shoes, reasoning that it would be impossible for him to "come back" without anything to wear on his feet. When she heard that Julia Child had died, she thought: "this was finally working out: John and Julia Child could have dinner together."
In an effort to get her mind around what happened, Ms. Didion ran the events of Dec. 30 through her mind again and again, just as she ran several decades of family life through her mind, looking for a way to de-link the chain of causation. What if they hadn't moved to New York so many years ago? What if Quintana had gone to a different hospital? What if they still lived in Brentwood Park in their two-story Colonial house with the center-hall plan?
Even when Quintana seems to be making a recovery, Ms. Didion finds it difficult to work: she has a panic attack in Boston, trying to cover the Democratic convention, and puts off finishing an article, thinking that without John, she has no one to read it. She feels "fragile, unstable," worried that when her sandal catches on the sidewalk, she will fall and there will be no one to take her to the emergency room. She takes to wearing sneakers about town and begins leaving a light on in the apartment throughout the night.
In this book, the elliptical constructions and sometimes mannered prose of the author's recent fiction give way to the stunning candor and piercing details that distinguished her groundbreaking early books of essays, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album." At once exquisitely controlled and heartbreakingly sad, "The Year of Magical Thinking" tells us in completely unvarnished terms what it is to love someone and lose him, what it is to have a child fall sick and be unable to help her.
It is a book that tells us how people try to make sense of the senseless and how they somehow go on.
The tragic coda to Ms. Didion's story is not recounted in these pages: the death - from an abdominal infection - of Quintana in August, a year and eight months after she first fell ill and a year and eight months after the death of her father. |
|
|
| !!! |
[Aug. 11th, 2005|07:40 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | nyt, tal | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  curious | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Camera Obscura - A Sister's Social Agony | ] |
Close Your Eyes And It’s Almost Like Radio (NYT)
The quirky tales of ‘This American Life’ make a bid for the small screen.
By LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN
Published: July 24, 2005
Ira Glass is having vision problems. This longtime public-radio producer, arguably the most visionary aural documentarian in the country, is not going blind; he is trying to bring “This American Life,” his quirky and popular weekly radio hour, to the small screen. And he’s worried that the bright lights of television might suck some of the power out of the show’s intimate, confessional and often revelatory narratives.
A director, an editor, a producer and Mr. Glass were camped in an editing studio near Canal Street in Lower Manhattan at 2 a.m. earlier this month, making the last push to finish the 40-minute pilot of “This American Life” for Showtime. “This is everything that is really slow about production, times 500,” Mr. Glass moaned, summing up the four-month process.
Mr. Glass, 46, has broken a lot of the rules of radio with “This American Life.” Each week its three segments, contributed by a cast of regulars and a variety of guest writers, thinkers and soulful eccentrics, are loosely organized around a theme like “Fiasco,” “Reuniting” or “Mind Games.” But the themes are almost incidental; it is the show’s literary quality and Mr. Glass’s offbeat production values that give them their intense power and appeal. Mr. Glass uses strategically placed breaks and music, along with droll asides and occasional audible giggles, to spin tales filled with irony, suspense, paradox, drama and humor out of the stuff of everyday life. The show has explored with equal vigor the worst production of “Peter Pan” ever staged and the despair of the second intifada. And it has given major career boosts to writers like David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and David Rakoff.
“This American Life” now has 1.7 million listeners on more than 500 stations, representing one of the biggest audiences on public radio and turning Mr. Glass into a kind of matinee idol for a certain bookish-but-hip sliver of the population. It has won a Peabody Award and a duPont-Columbia Award for broadcast journalism. David Mamet credited Mr. Glass with “reinventing” radio. But Bill McKibben, writing in The Nation in 1997, unwittingly pointed up Mr. Glass’s current predicament when he bestowed this compliment: “None of the pieces I’ve heard on ‘This American Life’ would work well on TV.”
Indeed, few shows since the era of Jack Benny and Burns and Allen have survived the transition. A number of public radio shows have tried and failed many times. “Television is the opposite of radio,” said John Hockenberry, who spent 12 years as a reporter and host at N.P.R., followed by nine years in television at NBC. “TV speaks to a crowd, and radio speaks to a single pair of ears.”
( Read more... ) |
|
|
| - Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote - |
[Mar. 5th, 2004|04:59 am] |
Holly stepped out of the car; she took the cat with her. Cradling him, she scratched his head and asked. "What do you think? This ought to be the right kind of place for a tough guy like you. Garbage cans. Rats galore. Plenty of cat-bums to gang around with. So scram," she said, dropping him; and when he did not move away, instead raised his thug-face and questioned her with yellowish pirate-eyes, she stamped her foot: "I said beat it!" He rubbed against her leg. "I said fuck off!" she shouted, then jumped back in the car, slammed the door, and : "Go," she told the driver. "Go. Go."
I was stunned. "Well, you are. You are a bitch."
We'd traveled a block before she replied. "I told you. We just met by the river one day : that's all. Independents, both of us. We never made each other any promises. We never --" she said, and her voice collapsed, a tic, an invalid whiteness seized her face. The car had paused for a traffic light. Then she had the door open, she was running down the street; and I ran after her.
...
"Oh, Jesus God. We did belong to each other. He was mine."
Then I made her a promise, I said I'd come back and find her cat : "I'll take care of him, too. I promise."
She smiled : that cheerless new pinch of a smile. "But what about me?" she said, whispered, and shivered again. "I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away. The mean reds, they're nothing. The fat woman, she nothing. This, though : my mouth's so dry, if my life depended on it I couldn't spit." She stepped in the car, sank in the seat. "Sorry, driver. Let's go."
...
But in the spring a postcard came : it was scribbled in pencil, and signed with a lipstick kiss... But the address, if it ever existed, never was sent, which made me sad, there was so much I wanted to write her : that I'd sold two stories, had read where the Trawlers were countersuing for divorce, was moving out of the brownstone because it was haunted. But mostly, I wanted to tell about her cat. I had kept my promise; I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets, and there were many false alarms - flashes of tiger-striped fur that, upon inspection, were not him. But one day, one cold sunshiny Sunday winter afternoon, it was. Flanked by potted plants and framed by clean lace curtains, he was seated in the window of a warm-looking room : I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he'd arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too. |
|
|
| "The End of Something" -- Ernest Hemingway |
[Oct. 1st, 2002|09:26 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  sad | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | [Craig David] - Key To My Heart | ] |
They sat on the blanket without touching each other and watched the moon rise.
"You don't have to talk silly," Marjorie said. "What's the matter?"
"I don't know."
"Of course you know."
"No I don't."
"Go on and say it."
Nick looked on at the moon, coming up over the hill.
"It isn't fun any more."
He was afraid to look at Marjorie. Then he looked at her. She sat there with her back toward him. He looked at her back. "It isn't fun any more. Not any of it."
She didn't say anything. He went on. "I feel as though everything was gone to hell inside of me. I don't know, Marge. I don't know what to say."
He looked on at her back.
"Isn't love fun any more?" Marjorie said.
"No," Nick said. Marjorie stood up. Nick sat there, his head in his hands.
"I'm going to take the boat," Marjorie called to him. "You can walk back around the point."
"All right," Nick said. "I'll push the boat off for you."
"You don't need to," she said. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| |
|
|
