A note on writing technique

Last week, my friend Jules lent me her copy of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking that I'm racing through with practically no effort. It is as if Joan is doing a mind-meld with me. There's nothing in it that I don't understand even though the subject is beyond my experience. The book is about Joan's struggle to keep it together after her husband of forty years dies in their living room, and her only daughter falls into a coma.

Anyway, I have just come across what I find to be a remarkable paragraph. But it's got nothing to do with death or grief. It's about that other favorite subject — writing.

The day was 5 December 2003. Her birthday.

Before dinner John [her late husband] sat by the fire in the living room and read to me out loud. The book from which he read was a novel of my own, A Book of Common Prayer, which...he was rereading to see how something worked technically. The sequence he read out loud was one in which Charlotte Douglas's husband Leonard pays a vist to the narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, and lets her know that what is happening in the country her family runs will not end well. The sequence is complicated (this was in fact the sequence John had meant to reread to see how it worked technically), broken by other action and requiring the reader to pick up the undertext in what Leonard Douglas and Grace Strasser-Mendana say to each other. "Goddamn," John said to me when he closed the book. "Don't ever tell me again you can't write. That's my birthday present to you."

Now I'm wondering what this is all about.