Joan Didion has written a memoir of personal loss, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she describes the twin tragedies that seized control of her life at the end of 2003 — the sudden, grave illness of her only child; the sudden, anguishing death of her husband — and the year that followed of questions, delusions, and relentless unknowing. Her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, had been her partner in life and letters for nearly 40 years; her daughter, Quintana, would die shortly after this book was finished.

With her memoir in my head, I went back to one of Didion’s earlier works, the celebrated collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which was first published in 1968. There, Didion depicted the American moral wilderness — a society fragmenting in a thousand shards of culture and counterculture — with prose steeped in the prophetic gloom of W.B. Yeats: “The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun; those have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.” Her latest book in a way returns to this theme of unraveling, but now Didion wanders in the wilderness of her own grief, circling personal totems — sickness and mortality — that she, too, finds blank and pitiless.

In one of the earlier book’s essays, a piece titled “On Going Home,” you will find sketches of her husband and daughter, and this remarkable snapshot of Didion celebrating her baby’s first birthday:

It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.

It is a thin and shadow-slight immortality that writing grants, but it is some comfort nonetheless: Quintana lives, nameless, limitless, in her mother’s hopes for her.

Things fall apart. A writer puts the pieces back together.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen