The reports are in on Joan Didion’s reading in Cleveland:

Writer Joan Didion, whose spare, piercing sensibility has colored American culture for 40 years, talked about her craft Tuesday evening at the Ohio Theatre in Cleveland.

At age 74, Didion’s fierceness in print contrasts with her fragility in person; she stumbled as she stepped up to the Cleveland stage.

“No matter how many times somebody says watch the step, I still trip,” she said without preamble, her voice deeper than expected, carrying a faint flatness that she has attributed to a girlhood in California.

Her fiction, she said, flowed invariably from her nonfiction reporting, and she compared journalism to sculpting a material already there while writing a novel was more akin to attempting a watercolor. She dismissed Wallace Stegner’s work as too polite and “Orlando,” by Virginia Woolf as “irritating.”

The daughter of a librarian and a financial officer who loved playing craps said her parents gave her free rein as a child in the Sacramento library, but “I wasn’t allowed to listen to the radio because there were scary things on it.”

She had wanted to be an oceanographer — “I was interested in how deep things were; as a child, that was always my question: ‘How deep is it?’¤ ” –and much of her work has pivoted around tensions of what was disclosed and hidden.

“It took me a long time to realize I was trying to come to terms with my failure to understand,” she said. “There was a lot I didn’t get.”

Famously immune to political fads and Hollywood power, Didion wrote essays about the cultural upheaval collected into “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” and a novel, “Play It As It Lays,” that host Charles Michener described as “the most shocking Hollywood novel since ‘The Day of the Locust.’ “

Didion, who sat very still, wearing a long lavender scarf, white top and dark slacks, said once she grasped the freeway metaphor in “Play It As It Lays,” the novel unlocked itself for her.

Freeways have long been an obsession of Didion’s. “It’s a novel about driving all day and going nowhere, about speed as an aesthetic experience. I saw that I could have very short chapters and very short sentences.”

When Michener asked her for comment on the presidency of Barack Obama, Didion said, “I’m sick of domestic politics. I couldn’t share in the narrative that this was a different election. The process was pretty much the same.”

Many of the audience questions went to “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion’s 2005 memoir of grief over the abrupt death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, as it entwined with the grave illness of their daughter.

“I decided the only way to structure it was to replicate the experience,” Didion said. “With grief, you go over it and over it and over it again — it’s a trauma that you relive every time you go over it, seeing it from a slightly different angle. That’s what one does with grief. You can’t let it go.”

In her 1968 book of essays called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion wrote: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.”

As one creator of “New Journalism,” a style of reporting that allows the writer to be seen in the work, Didion had it all: a deadpan wit, a cool detachment, a piercing observational intelligence and chiseled, perceptive sentences.

“She is really a distinctive American voice,” said Charles Michener, an acquaintance and former Newsweek arts editor. “There is nobody quite like her.”

Michener will interview Didion Tuesday evening on stage as the finale to this season’s Writers Center Stage series. The program, run by the Cuyahoga County Library Foundation, brought in Didion when it became clear John Updike was too ill to fulfill his commitment.

Didion, 74, brings her own brand of courage to Cleveland, in that her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly in 2003, followed by their only child, Quintana Roo, eight months later. “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a book about grief and loss, won Didion the National Book Award in 2005.

 

Although not her best writing, the rawness of that memoir resonated with readers. It became a best seller, with 511 customer reviews posted onAmazon.com.

“That’s a book that shouldn’t work — written in the moment, breaking all the rules — and it does,” said Dinty W. Moore, who teaches Didion’s craft as director of creative writing at Ohio University. “She’s had a long career and done amazing work at both ends, from ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ and ‘The White Album’ to ‘The Year.’ ”

Michener said he was rereading Didion’s fiction — “Play It As It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer” — and was struck by how differently it reads from her nonfiction, reminding him in its dread and menace of Don DeLillo’s books.

“She is a very compelling writer; she has her own music, the rhythms, repetitions,” Michener said. “Hers is a very despairing vision. I’ve known Joan for a long time. She’s a mysterious person. It will be interesting to see how voluble she is in public. In private, she is so quiet as to be almost inaudible.”