Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold Page #8

---

Nor can we know the unending absence

that follows, the void...

the relentless succession of moments

during which we will confront

the experience of meaninglessness itself.

The reason I had to write it down

was nobody had ever told me

what it was like.

It was a coping mechanism, it turned out,

but I didn't plan it that way.

The manuscript

kind of just showed up.

I knew she was working on something,

but she doesn't really talk about

what she's working on.

I took it home, and, well,

you can imagine, it was...

It was an incredible thing and unexpected.

Uh...

And I...

I think she felt she had to do this.

This was... She had to kind of get it down

to understand it...

as what... But it was amazing

the two events happening, you know?

John and then Quintana.

And, of course,

Quintana is not in the book,

even though she had died that August

and I got the book in October.

It's the first book about grief...

not by a believer.

Joan Didion, goodness knows,

believes in human achievement.

For someone with that perspective

to write about coming up

against this great big wall of loss,

void, the person she loved

most in the world disappearing...

speaks to a whole section of people

who have had nothing to read

at all on that subject.

Who knows what to do

or how to do it?

You could be grieving your wife,

who died a month ago...

and everybody else has moved on...

and everything is normal.

A matter of months has gone by,

and I guess

you're supposed to be just normal.

Again, she wasn't writing

through the haze of romanticism...

she was writing through

the deeply felt poignancy

of someone who could report on grief.

It's the hardest thing to write about.

She did it as a reporter.

She did it as the quote-unquote

"the Joan Didion" character

of the novels in a true story about grief.

I think the hardest thing

was finishing it.

Because,

for as long as I was writing it...

I was in touch with him

in some way, you know?

And when you finished the book?

"We all know

that if we are to live, ourselves,

there comes a time

when we must relinquish our dead.

Let them go, keep them dead.

Let go of them in the water.

Let them become

the photograph on the table.

Knowing this does not make it any easier

to let go of them in the water.

I did not want the year

after either of them died to end.

I knew that as the second year began

and the days passed,

certain things would happen.

My image of them at the moment of death

would be something

that happened in another year.

My sense of John and Quintana themselves,

John and Quintana alive...

would become more remote...

softened...

transmuted into whatever

best served my life without them.

In fact, this is already happening.

For once in your life, just let it go."

Hey.

Look how much soup you have.

- Who makes all this for you?

- What soup?

All this, isn't that soup?

No, that's ice cream.

Griffin feels the need to report he's been

getting calls from concerned friends.

The focus of their concern is my health,

specifically my weight.

I point out that I have weighed

the same amount since the early 1970's.

Griffin says that he recognizes this.

He is only reporting

what those concerned friends

have mentioned to him.

I had been thinking that maybe it was time

to do something totally new...

and it might be interesting to do a play.

So... I had some conversations

with David Hare.

When we came to make a play...

faced with two problems:

One, she had never written a play.

But, secondly,

we were faced with the very real problem

that Quintana, her daughter,

had died since the book was written.

And whereas the book

was about grief for her husband,

since then, her daughter had died.

And so, I was faced with the unhappy task

of saying to Joan...

that she would have to open up

about material which is not

in the book, but which...

Which would be in the play

and about which at the time,

she had no intention of writing.

But one of the wonderful things

about working with Joan

is that she doesn't ever

let any discomfort she's feeling show.

And so, she never said to me...

"This is fantastically painful."

She just regarded it as a job to be done

and it had to be done.

And I think it was done

at immense personal cost and expense.

At that point, she was down to 75 pounds.

And I said, "If I do this play,

I'm going to put some flesh on her bones.

That's what we're going to achieve."

We're going to plump her up, uh,

by doing this play.

We're gonna make her happy

and by making her happy...

We're never gonna make her fat,

but we're not gonna keep her at 75 pounds.

We're gonna get... And... And we did.

In other words, I fed her and I would...

If I was working with her,

we'd have sandwiches and I'd say,

"I'm not going to eat my sandwich

until you eat yours.

You're going to eat that sandwich."

We just fed her,

and the stage manager

formalized it to a point

where she put a table up

in the wings of the theater,

and she put a red check tablecloth

and she put a sign saying "Cafe Didion"

in the wings of the theater.

And so, between shows

or before the show, she'd come in

and we'd give her croissants

and jam or soup.

By the time the run was over,

she was in pretty good shape.

We were very pleased and I said,

"I don't care whether this play

is a service to art,

it is a service to humanity, we...

We've got Joan blooming again."

And... And I think the play gave her

a frame to her life

at a very, very, very difficult time.

The larger thing

I came to understand...

was the value of that communal experience.

The audience is in the collaboration, too,

and we all are in it together

which is very like life itself, right?

This happened...

on December 30th, 2003.

That may seem a while ago,

it won't when it happens to you,

and it will happen to you.

The details will be different,

but it will happen.

That's what I'm here to tell you.

It was lovely for me to see the pictures

of you and John getting ready.

Can you see all right,

or shall I tilt it up?

I don't think

you can see otherwise, can you?

I can see.

- Is that... Is that me?

- Yes, it is.

Well, she has dark glasses on anyway...

There you look very glamorous.

Not saying you don't...

Haven't often, if not always,

looked extremely glamorous,

but that one is particularly sort of...

"dark glasses" glamorous.

Oh, here she is.

The lovely... The lovely girls.

In March 2009, Tash died.

I'd got a different understanding

how things change, but not only change

in a way that you certainly

hadn't expected...

but also change...

Change our perceptions, that's what

The Year of Magical Thinking was about.

This one is John.

- There's John, yeah.

- Next to Tasha.

I'm so glad you brought these.

Yeah, thank you, I'm glad, too.

It...

changed my perceptions in a specific,

amongst other, ways...

that I understood...

something I hadn't before.

Rate this script:5.0 / 1 vote