| j o a n  d i d i o n |

BY DAVE EGGERS

Joan Didion's new novel, "The Last Thing He Wanted," is her first in 12 years. Set in 1984, it centers on Elena McMahon, an American journalist who gets tangled up in the covert sales of American arms in Central America. It is sparely written and tightly plotted and fiercely intelligent — all the sorts of things we've come to expect from Didion. Some things that you probably know but if not will be helpful in enjoying this interview: Didion is married to John Gregory Dunne, and has been for a long time. When she says "we," he makes "we." Though she no longer writes the sort of personal-social essays that made up books like "The White Album" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," she still contributes journalism and critical essays to magazines like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In person she is very small. She is also graceful, personable, warm and funny. With "The Last Thing He Wanted," I read that you weren't sure how it was going to turn out until you were finished with it. No, no I wasn't. I wanted to do a very, very tight plot, just a single thread — you wouldn't even see the thread and then when you pulled it at the end everything would fall into place. That was the intention there. But you would go mad if you tried to plot that closely ahead of time. So essentially what you have to do, I found, is you have to make it up every day as you go along. And then you have to play the cards you already have on the table — you have to deal with what you've already said. Quite often, you've got yourself into things that seem to lead nowhere, but if you force yourself to deal with them, that was the discipline of it. For example, one of the first things I had started with in this book was the idea of this woman walking off a campaign. Because I'd covered some campaigns in '88 and '92, I wanted to use some of that sense of a campaign. So then, I didn't know, then she would go to Miami to see her father. Then, I couldn't figure out where she'd been. Then I decided she ought to be from Los Angeles and had been married to someone in the oil business. That kind of gave me a fresh start. But then I was having to get her from Los Angeles to being a political reporter, right? It was a really hard thing to do. It was also a lot of fun. There were certain chapters where it does sound like you're starting from scratch almost, when you start hearing about Elena's dreams, for example. Yeah, I mean, I was just sitting there wondering what I could do that day. Sometimes, also, you just feel it's right to step back from it a little bit. Otherwise it's going to get linear, "and then she said, and then she did..." It doesn't keep you awake to write it. Next: How computers make writing more like sculpture