Both audio (mp3) and video (streaming) recordings of Joan Didion's two-day visit to the Kelly Writers House are now available, linked here: LINK. And a few photos are here (taken by John Carroll). I spent a good measure of my time and energy, during our various discussions (several public, others informally), focusing on the continuity between her early writing and The Year of Magical Thinking which so many people say marks a big change. But grab your paperback copy of that recent elegaic memoir and look at the bottom of page 7 and top of 8. She begins there to say that the manner of her writing has always been--increasingly in fact--a matter of hiding "thoughts" (she doesn't say feeling but means that) behind an increasingly untransparent, impenetrable skein of words. In other words, she does with language what I and many others who enjoy modern (and experimental) writing have always admired: the significance is in the words and the manner means something, so don't think you must find the true feelings below in symbols of some truth under or beyond the language that is itself no more or less itself the truth of what is being said. In that prefatory passage Joan Didion seems to say that now--now that the trauma of loss has struck her--she wants to be less impenetrable, since she herself is her writing and she wants that self no longer to hide what's really true about her feelings. Yet that's just a prefatory expression of hope. If you read the book closely you'll see that she "fails" to do what I think is the cliche of writing about the death of a loved one--that is to say, she does not change--but rather she reaffirms--that being made in the writing. It's the writing and only the writing. Indeed it's the main lesson she learned from the love relationship with her writer husband. It's the writing. That's where one is. So in the end, the fact that Magical Thinking is no more "personal" in its writing than Miami is the most remarkable thing about the newest development of his great writer.
When (in '67 or so) Joan Didion wrote through her first major breakdown she described a rejection of the conventional American narrative mode (a mode that tried to prevent improvisation, for one thing), she charted a move from narrative to image, from "ethical" to "electrical," and her mantra was--it still is--the Poundian call for juxtaposition: petals on a wet black bough. If one reads The Year of Magical Thinking as a Poundian foray rather than a self-help manual for grieving, one won't have it quite right but will be close enough, and, I believe, will derive tremendous pleasure from the reading. Read or re-read the passage about the family photographs along her hallway and I think you'll see what I mean.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
