Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking

Common experience: Joan Didion and Vanessa Redgrave

This month, British audiences will get the chance to see Vanessa Redgrave in the tale of grief, loss and magical thinking that took Broadway by storm. Here, Joan Didion tells how she turned her life into an award-winning play

Vanessa Redgrave on performing The Year of Magical Thinking Alex Clark on Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking Iam making these first notes on Monday, January 29, 2007. It is 11am in a rehearsal studio on West 42nd Street. New York winter light, floor-to-ceiling glass, a barre, the Bill T Jones dancers from the next studio taking a break in the corridor.

The theatrical company for The Year of Magical Thinking has assembled here for the first of what will be 31 days of work to shape the play for previews beginning March 6 and its Broadway opening.

There is Vanessa Redgrave, here from London to play the single part. There is David Hare, here from London to direct. There is the producer Scott Rudin, whose idea it was to make this play. There are the other producers, the marketing people, the advertising people, the press people.

There are, it occurs to me uneasily, entirely too many people here this morning with one or another kind of investment in what happens between now and the opening.

For that matter, I am one of these people. I am "the writer", or, in this instance, since I wrote not only the book from which the play takes its name but also the play itself, "the playwright".

David Hare says a few graceful words to the company. It occurs to me, another uneasy thought, since he is in this case the director and I the writer, that David Hare has more graceful words at his disposal than I do.

He explains that since he and Vanessa and I began rehearsal during two December days in London, we plan to pick up where we left it and will not do the traditional first-day read-through for the producers.

I had not until now even known about the traditional first-day read-through for the producers. I know nothing, I say nothing, I concentrate on the model of the set Bob Crowley has designed. I have seen this model before, but now I recall a discussion in which someone mentioned sightlines... [article continues, Telegraph, 19/4/2008]

Η Joan Didion με τον σύζυγό της, τον συγγραφέα John Gregory Dunne, και την κόρη τους Quintana Roo στο Malibu, California, το 1976