This is how it begins:

July 26 2010. Today would be her wedding anniversary.

Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it:

Seven years ago today we took the leis from the florist’s boxes and shook the water in which they were packed onto the grass … The white peacock spread his fan. The organ sounded. She wove white stephanotis into the thick braid that hung down her back. She dropped a tulle veil over her head and the stephanotis loosened and fell. The plumeria blossom …

What Didion doesn’t say, here or elsewhere, is what Quintana looked like: was she tall or short, plump or skinny – who knows?

LRB 3 November 2011 | PDF Download