Literary Review - December 2005 / January 2006

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DIARIES&MEMOIRS

J ESSICA M ANN

‘LIFE CHANGES FAST’

T HE Y EAROF M AGICAL T HINKING By Joan Didion (Fourth Estate 227pp £12.99)

W HEN I G ROW U P By Bernice Rubens (Little, Brown 229pp £17.99)

‘A LLMYLIFE I have harboured a sneaking assurance that God, or whoever is in charge of these things, would not take me in mid-sentence,’ Bernice Rubens wrote, and her confidence was justified. When God, or whoever is in charge of these things, did take a writer in mid-sentence it was not Rubens but John Gregory Dunne. He was sitting in an armchair by the fire with a drink; his wife, the writer Joan Didion, was cooking dinner. ‘John was talking and then he wasn’t.’ Joan saw he was sitting motionless, his left hand raised. At first she thought he was joking. Then she realised he was dead. ‘Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,’ Didion realised, and the words became her oft-repeated refrain. The new way of life begins with the ambulance, hospital, social worker, telephone calls, friends and eventually funeral, which had to be delayed because their adopted, only daughter Quintana was desperately ill in intensive care. (She died a few months after John.) Those facts alone are enough to evoke pity and terror in the reader, and this book is indeed painful to read, the emotions intensified by the power of the writing. In a direct, unaffected style, Didion describes the ensuing twelve months. She spent them trying to keep hold of John, which does not mean that she authorised unusual attempts at resuscitation nor that she visited mediums, but that thoughts of every detail of their life together remained at the centre of her every moment, waking or asleep. In New York or California, each step was made meaningful by its proximity to where he had walked, each meal by his having consumed a similar one, each moment marked by the thought ‘This time last year we...’. Their marriage had been long, and closer than most. They collaborated on screenplays, read, commented on and edited each other’s work, and, as both worked at home,

spent their days together. Shattered by his death, Didion followed the well-mapped path from simple grief to mourning, which, she realises, is the act of dealing with grief, and as she travelled, she turned her experiences into a book. It is what widowed writers do – think of Nina Bawden’s polemic against the privatised railways, or Sheila Hale’s against the NHS, both reviewed in these pages. But therapeutic memoirs do not make cheerful or encouraging reading, and one needs to feel particularly strong to tackle Didion’s. Anguish so vividly evoked is infectious. When I Grow Upwill make readers sad too because Bernice Rubens died before it appeared. But it was written cheerfully and in the deceptively random, spontaneous style of all her fiction. According to Beryl Bainbridge’s introduction, Bernice never knew from one page to another where the story she was telling would lead, but in this memoir it travels in a straight line from birth to the moment when, aged seventy-five, she settles down to tell the whole, unembellished truth. Bernice’s grandparents were Jewish immigrants who settled in Cardiff. Her father was a tallyman, her mother a teacher, and everyone in the family a professional or amateur musician. She was born in Splott, which was, she writes, ‘the unmentionable and undisputable armpit of Cardiff’. There are war-child stories of air-raids and rationing and a German-Jewish refugee foster-brother; there was Cardiff High School and University. She studied English – a ‘major folly’. Then Bernice became a schoolteacher, a film director, a scriptwriter and an actress. She married, had children, divorced, moved house every few years – and she became a successful novelist. ‘My mother said I was over-imaginative, but I was simply a liar by nature. I was happily at home with mendacity. It was less boring than the truth. My natural home lay in fiction.’ Writing had not been her ambition. ‘My first book just happened.’ After that, she used her novels ‘to make sense of the past’. She is self-deprecating about the paraphernalia of a successful writer’s life. An author tour, whether for publishers or the British Council, is ‘whoring’ – ‘the only other trade in which you sell your goods but you’ve still got them’. At one literary lunch Bernice is not asked to sign a single book, while Edna O’Brien is besieged by fans. At another, she is introduced as ‘Denise Robbins’ and makes her speech without correcting the mistake; in New Zealand she is mistaken for her friend Beryl Bainbridge. The two women had met on a writers’ tour in Israel and after that ‘got into the habit of doing gigs

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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