but cannot proceed otherwise. Only when she receives the autopsy results, almost a full year later than she should have, can she finally admit the fact of Dunne’s death, the fact of his being gone for good. For months she has nursed the belief that if she did not read the obituary notice, he would not be dead. She could not throw out Dunne’s shoes because he would be returning and would need them; she could not throw out the broken alarm clock or the Buffalo pens long gone dry because he would be back and would want them. She lives by signs, probing everything for symbolic meaning. His dictionary opened to a particular page must signify something, and inadvertently turning over the page means she has lost the crucial message. She lives ritualistically, doing things that will ensure his return, ignoring evidence that says he will not. This, she discovers, is the madness of grief at work, and even though it subsides by the end of this first year, it is a genuine state of madness while it lasts and one which she explores with harrowing precision.

What Didion is most at pains to convey is that grief is not what one expects it to be. It is not the same as mourning, and it does not hit at once. As the initial shock of a sudden death recedes, grief roars in and completely alters the landscape of ordinary existence: It “comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” It is unpredictable and without any forward movement. One is passive before its onslaughts, caught up vertiginously in great surges of pain and panic. It is, she is glad to read in Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), a real mental derangement but one not treated as a pathology because it is known to pass; it is eventually overcome. But how? When? It may not be a pathological state, but so great is her disorientation that she nevertheless imagines she might be pathologically bereaved.

Oddly enough, more helpful than the clinical observations of psychologists is what Didion finds in a 1922 volume of etiquette by Emily Post. Post’s pronouncements on death and dying are direct, practical, instinctively right in their awareness of the unique kind of mental and physiological suffering someone in Didion’s position experiences. Yet reassuring as it is for her to find someone speaking from a time when death was not swathed in euphemisms or wholly eclipsed, all of Post’s knowing advice about heated milk and sunny rooms cannot change the dark reality of grief: “Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments, during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness.” That kind of existential pain, a pain that cannot be accurately imagined or successfully prepared for, is what Didion’s memoir tries to communicate.

Compounding this emotional turmoil is the fact that her daughter, having defied the odds to pull through the December crisis (a case of a healthy and newly married young woman suddenly facing death, as ordinary flu turns to extraordinary septic shock) has now, several months later, again fallen seriously ill in Los Angeles. Didion flies out to the West Coast, where she is swept up in what she calls the vortex effect, the track to the past, caught unawares and pulled into the rich shared life she and Dunne knew in the twenty-four years they lived in Los Angeles. Now the city is full only of ghosts, reminders of past happiness, a quarter-century’s history that threatens at every intersection of Wilshire Boulevard to overtake and undo her. Her heart stops when she passes the theater where they saw The Graduate in 1967, or when she buys bottled water at a Rite-Aid pharmacy on the spot of the old Bistro restaurant where they celebrated Quintana’s third birthday. Hard as these memories are for Didion to revisit, and much as she tries to shield herself from being sideswiped by them, for the reader these are some of the most moving passages in the memoir, these clear-eyed vignettes of Didion and Dunne, writing together in the big old house on Franklin Avenue, entertaining together in Malibu, polishing film scripts together in Hawaii.

What is clear is that theirs was truly a joint literary career. As she says, they were rarely apart in forty years, living and working together, their personal and professional lives wholly (and apparently harmoniously) integrated. Dunne was her first reader, her principal editor; she was his. They trusted each other as they did no one else. Beyond the writing, Dunne was what tethered his wife to the world. Her notorious emotional fragility, the fearfulness she admits she was born with, the anxiety only partly hidden behind her exceedingly crafted prosethis is what Dunne neutralized and made functional. He handled all telephone calls, kept in touch with friends, made all arrangements. Without him, the isolation and sense of detachment becomes overwhelming. What she has lost is her sense of control, always something on which she had at best a slim purchase. Now, with her husband dead and her daughter close to death (Quintana died in August, 2005, after the memoir had been written, and this fact is not mentioned here), Didion realizes the widespread belief that people can control much of anything in their lives is scandalously false. In spite of what her daughter’s doctors insisted, one cannot “manage” things; in spite of the wish to protect those one loves, one cannot make people safe. There are limits to what one can control.

There are limits to what writing can control, tooeven Didion’s writing, which has always seemed such an artifact of control, so calculated and ironically distanced, so spare yet gravid with implication. Spare, lean, detachedthese are terms critics seem unable to resist attaching to her prose, and they characterize her writing here, too, though the style is even more stripped down than usual: It feels raw, less writerly. This is appropriate. She is writing out of a place of exposed nerves and chaotic emotions. She has said that she was not so much writing a book as trying to sort things out for herself; it was only later, as she began to think about structure, that she realized it could even be a book. The structure she came up with reflects the original impulse behind the writing: a nonlinear narrative of twenty-two short sections which keep coming back to that fatal night of December 30 and trying again, from a different angle, to identify just what happened and why, trying to determine if it might have unfolded differently and how. There are pages of fugitive lyricism, but far more show Didion at her most pared back, reporting, itemizing (“let me try a chronology here”), the uninflected and reiterated declarative sentences shedding even her typical less-is-more chic.

What she is trying to create in all of this, she says, is something that will “collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.” Like T. S. Eliot before her, she has gathered these fragments, the many strands of the memoir, to shore up against her ruin. Beyond that act of assembling and remembering, she can only do what Dunne once told her to when they were swimming into the cave at Portuguese Bend. The tide had to be just right to catch it as it moved through the rocks: “You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change.” Go with the change. That is what Didion hopes she can do, what she hopes writing this memoir has allowed her to do.