Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
I had the good fortune to see Vanessa Redgrave in
"The Year Of Magical Thinking"
in 2007.
As they dim the lights on Broadway tonight
The play is based on Joan Didion's memoir about the loss of both her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and then her daughter, Quintana.
Ironically Quintana was hospitalized after a collapse and bleeding in her brain.
"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it."
"I can think of no more cruel example of life imitating art. As Vanessa Redgrave so convincingly inhabited Didion's pain she cannot have known she was rehearsing for her own strikingly similar tragedy.
On stage, Redgrave skilfully morphed into the grief-stricken writer, playing Didion with muscular conviction.
To prepare for the part, Redgrave will have pictured the life-support machine, relived the sadness of her own ex-husband dying, tried to imagine the horror of losing a daughter. In this light, the death of Natasha Richardson seems linked to Joan Didion's own loss; an aftershock rippling out from the tragedy that exploded her life and spawned the memoir.
The arc of Natasha Richardson's life mirrors that of Quintana, too: both born to well-known artistic parents, both blonde, talented, their deaths shocking and inexplicable. The dreadful irony cannot have escaped either mother this week.
In this work Joan Didion has given us all a blueprint for grief."
added quotes from Charlotte Ross - Evening Standard UK
--Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Joan Didion lost her husband five days after her only child lapsed into a coma (her daughter died, two years later).
Natasha Jane Richardson 5. 11. 1963-3.18.2009
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