On death, grief and moving on, Didion captivates an L.A. audience

Joan Didion’s award-winning “The Year of Magical Thinking” was published in 2005, and you could call the time in her life since, “The Years of Talking and Reading From ‘The Year of Magical Thinking.’ ”

That has been particularly true in the last six months as Didion helped mount on Broadway the one-woman play, starring Vanessa Redgrave, she wrote based on the book. So she was just a bit weary of having to listen to herself read it, she confessed to her audience Monday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“I would rather just talk to you,” said the acclaimed fiction and nonfiction writer, appearing as part of the Music Center Speaker Series. (Later, she did read from the book.)

“I’m still going to talk about life and death and medicine,” she assured people in the audience, who came perhaps because they had been moved by the unstintingly honest account of grappling with life after the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in late December 2003. In the book, she also writes about the lengthy illness of their only daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who, at 39, died more than a year and a half after her father and shortly after Didion turned in her manuscript for the memoir.

“With these experiences, I was under the impression that knowledge would give me power,” Didion said Monday. “It did not. What I got instead was the realization that I had no power.... That was not an inconsiderable thing to learn.”

A slight figure clad in a brown tweed skirt suit and dark stockings on a hot night, Didion, 72, stood before the microphone, head often down, mostly speaking in a monotone that lost its volume just when she was getting to the driest, wittiest parts of her sentences. A person in the back of the theater would long to just run up and sit on the edge of the stage to catch all her words.

Still, she was riveting. Didion’s account of the epic medical interventions visited upon her ailing daughter was chilling. She was bemused by the obfuscating language doctors use to talk about death.

And -- at least in the case of her daughter -- she found doctors’ heroic measures preposterous. When they were resuscitating her daughter, Didion said, she asked one of them if Quintana had been deprived of oxygen for more than five minutes. He told her it had been close to an hour.

Quintana’s “husband and I looked at each other and told the surgeon to let her go,” Didion told the audience. “I wondered why we had to tell him.”

Didion noted that there is a “belief that every death can and should be avoided.”

She mentioned the recent death of writer David Halberstam, who was riding in a car as a passenger when the vehicle was broadsided.

“I can’t tell you how many people asked me, ‘Was he wearing a seat belt?’ ” she said, giving an example of how people search for a flaw that causes a death.

“The answer is yes,” she said.

Her husband’s death from a massive heart attack that occurred in the couple’s apartment prompted similar comments from friends:

“ ‘If only your building had a defibrillator,’ said a friend after John died. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If only the building had had a defibrillator and a crash cart and a trained medical staff,’ ” Didion said.

She and Dunne were married nearly 40 years. They lived together and sometimes wrote together. Everything she wrote, she said, she gave to him to look at and critique before she delivered it to an editor.

“There are certain losses you do not get past, but you incorporate them into who you are,” she said, adding matter-of-factly, “I am no longer deranged. Grief can cause derangement.”

Part of our skittishness about death is because “we don’t see people die,” she mused. “In my mother’s generation ... there was always someone dying in a spare bedroom.”

During a question-and-answer period after her talk, she veered into current events, including the scandal of fabricated memoirs. As for her own memoir on coping with her husband’s death, she deadpanned, “I was pretty confident about what happened.” There was a pause before the audience broke into laughter.

Didion, a New York resident who lived 24 years in the Los Angeles area and wrote some of her most piercing work on Southern California, was asked what she thought of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger:

“I kind of get him. I didn’t expect to,” she said, chuckling softly.

carla.hall@latimes.com