Joan Didion’s ‘Magical Thinking,’ Playing in a City of Memories
By ANITA GATES in The New York Times, April 22, 2009

JOAN DIDION knows Hartford well. Her husband, the novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, was born there and grew up in West Hartford with five siblings (including the author Dominick Dunne), so the couple spent plenty of time there during almost 40 years of marriage.

Joan Didion pic left by Peter Foley

“It was fantastically green,” Ms. Didion, 74, recalled last month in a telephone interview from her Manhattan apartment. “It seemed infinitely comforting, compared with New York.” And sometimes they paid the city unexpectedly long visits, like the time their daughter, Quintana, came down with chicken pox while staying with her grandmother.
“Recently I was driving up past Hartford — I had to go to Dartmouth — and all those memories kept flooding back,” she said.
So it is significant that Ms. Didion’s play, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” is currently being performed at TheaterWorks, in her husband’s hometown. As her many fans know, the play, like the book on which it is based, is about Mr. Dunne’s death of a heart attack in December 2003 and Ms. Didion’s emotional “process,” as the therapists say, in the year that followed. The play, a one-woman show, covers a period longer than the book does, extending the action to 2005, when Quintana, Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne’s only child, died at 39 after a series of lingering, sometimes mysterious illnesses.

The full stroy at the NYT online.