email bio November 19, 2005 You don't need to know the particulars of Joan Didion's past two years to know they haven't been easy. You just have to look at her.

The first thing I notice as the elevator doors at the Brown Palace part and Didion, 70, walks out, is her moss-colored overcoat. It swamps her skeletal frame, as if she's grabbed someone else's coat from the closet - a much taller, wider, more robust someone. Her face has the outline of the elfin woman's face that graced her earlier books, girlish even into her 40s, but her eyes are deeply sunken, her cheeks hollow.

When we sit in the lobby, the coat stays put. And when she finally removes it, nearly 40 minutes into the interview - a gesture that seems to coincide with her comfort level, rather than her body temperature - she reveals arms so birdlike, she could wear a napkin ring as a bracelet and still it might dangle some.

But I'm not that bold and Didion, I soon learn, isn't that frail. And the subject of her new book - grief and the terrifying path it cut through her life - lies there, between us, so we play our assigned parts, actors determined the show will go on.

Didion has spent her life training her keen intellect on cultural currents, in nonfiction essays with a personal bent, such as Slouching to Bethlehem, a devastating portrayal of the social disintegration of the '60s, or The White Album and in novels such as Play it As It Lays.

This time, she trains that intellect on her own internal tides - to wrenching, powerful effect. Only weeks out, her new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, has won the National Book Award for nonfiction and is securely perched at No. 2 on The New York Times best-seller list.

The book recounts Didion's fragile state of mind in the year following the hospitalization of her only child, daughter Quintana, with a life-threatening infection, and the unexpected death of her husband of 40 years, author and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne. On Dec. 30, 2003, after they'd been at the hospital visiting Quintana, Dunne slumped motionless in his living room chair, dead of a heart attack, while Didion was mixing a salad.

In a tragic addendum, Quintana recently died as well, at age 39, after the book had been finished. Magical Thinking was released as is, with no mention of that fact.

How, I wonder, does a woman undertake a 10-city book tour in light of this second, terrible blow? Didion's response surprises me. How does she not, she says.

"This time, it would have been very easy not to go out, not to do promotion," she says, in a voice that's often hard to hear above the lobby's minimal noise, "but that would have been total madness. Quintana died in August, and it was still too fresh a thing to simply stay home. I had the fear of sinking. It seemed better to proceed."

Indeed, negotiating airports and other details of travel - rather than remaining under the watchful eye of friends and relatives, who have been vigilant since her husband's death - has made her feel more "capable," she says, less sheltered.

Didion notes that Quintana never totally recovered from her illness, which seemed at first to be flu, then morphed into a full body infection, followed by a pulmonary embolism, surgery and endless rehab.

"She still had not regained the use of her right hand and to any real extent the use of her right leg. She could walk with a cane, but she couldn't do it reliably enough to cross the street."

"She was near death all summer, I realized later. I realized it at one level, but you don't want to. The doctors told us she was very sick, but we'd seen her very sick before and she'd gotten better. We didn't want to absorb it."

It's hard to fathom someone coping with such a loss, after struggling so recently with a spouse's death. Where does she put this new event emotionally?

That, in short, is the theme of her book. The "magical thinking" of the title refers to Didion's irrational thoughts, in the month following Dunne's death, that her husband might come back. For this reason, she declines donating his organs, is taken aback at the idea of an obituary. Though she bags up his shorts, socks, sweat shirts, she can't bring herself to clear out his shoes. "I stood there for a moment, then realized why: He would need shoes if he was to return."

"I went crazy," she says at her book signing at the Tattered Cover later that day. "That was totally unexpected to me. I was physiologically and emotionally deranged for a period of time."

Didion wrote the book partly from default. She had been planning to write about Kobe Bryant, but was counting on a trial to lend structure to her piece. When the charges against Bryant were dropped, she abandoned the idea.

Meanwhile, she had begun typing up her notes regarding Quintana's hospitalization. "I had the sense I might need them," she says. She also had begun writing her thoughts about Dunne's death. "When I realized I was thinking about how to structure it, I realized I was probably writing a book."

Anyone who has read Didion's work knows that she is a master of control, her pieces scrupulously structured, her facts released like bullets in a shooting gallery: at precisely the right moment. By contrast, she has told interviewers, Magical Thinking was almost "automatic writing."

"This was much more open," she says. "Usually I sit there all day playing solitaire, looking up words or something else to avoid writing, and then I don't start until 5 in the afternoon, so I might have half a page done by the time I make dinner. This was quite different. Usually, when you write, you're trying to find what you think . . . This time, I knew what I thought, so writing was much more fluid."

Didion finished the book in three months - a year and a day after Dunne had died. That point, as it turns out, was critical to the book's effectiveness. "I wanted to finish it in a year's time frame so that it would be absolutely raw and not get remote," she says.

That's a quality most books on grieving sorely lack, she notes. Of the many titles she read after her husband's death, those offering personal accounts always seemed to describe the trauma from a safe distance, after time had passed. They "didn't touch the way I actually felt," she says. Others by professional counselors offered absurd advice "like don't take the insurance money and decorate the living room."

Only Emily Post, she says, took the bull by the horns, focusing on details that could actually be of comfort. In her 1922 etiquette book, Post urged readers to direct the bereaved to sit "in a sunny room," to stoke a fire, offer "a little thin toast, a poached egg."

"Those who are in great distress want no food," Post wrote, "but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it, and something warm to start digestion... is what they most need."

Didion later learned that Post had lost a child two years before she wrote the book. "Of course, that's why it's so dead-on about what happens."

As we talk, I am aware that Didion's eyes always seem on the verge of tearing up, though they never do. Often, she switches to the second person, as in "at first, you are obsessed with dredging up the memory of going through what happened."

Despite her obvious frailty, there's a steeliness to her, and her sharp mind seems to fill the space in a way that her physical presence can't - a fact that wouldn't surprise readers who tend to speak of her with an awe bordering on worship. At her book signing, nearly 300 fans of all ages packed the room, hanging on each word.

"Working is a solace," she says, emphasizing the distinction. "So much of a solace that I can't even at this moment imagine taking a vacation."

With Quintana's death, Didion faces another year of magical thinking. At the same time, it's clear she's still absorbing Dunne's loss, a notion underscored when she admits, with the slightest hesitation, that his shoes are still in the closet.

"There has been no reason to go through them . . . I haven't had the time for one thing," she says, sounding defensive for the first time during our interview. "If I moved," she adds feebly, "I would do it."

Friends and relatives have no doubt admonished her to get rid of the reminders. But grief, Didion knows, has its own timetable. Tidy resolutions are for less incisive minds.

As our interview concludes, it's nearly noon. Although outside the weather is springlike, forecast to hit 70 degrees, Didion puts on her giant overcoat, gathers her scarf and slides her owlish leopard print sunglasses into place, as if she's donning protective armor, piece by piece. She notes that her publicist is on the way to pick her up and take her to her home, where they'll have lunch.

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