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When writer Joan Didion speaks at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, it won't be the first time she has stepped foot on UCLA's campus. But it will be the first time she has returned since her daughter was hospitalized here for a substantial length of time at the UCLA Medical Center.

"The spring I was there with Quintana, the Festival of Books went on one week while I was there, and I have a very clear picture of worrying that I couldn't get a parking place and going extra early to the hospital to ensure I would," Didion said.

"And it was perfectly alright. I was really baffled as to why there were still parking places."

The time she spent at the medical center was indeed full of baffling moments, which she chronicles in detail in her latest work, "The Year of Magical Thinking."

The memoir describes a period in Didion's life when she grieved for the sudden, unexpected death of her husband and writer John Gregory Dunne at the same time that her daughter Quintana was hospitalized with a mysterious infection that eventually brought her into septic shock.

"The Year of Magical Thinking" powerfully captures the cycle of grief and mourning that Didion experienced at that time, particularly through its fluid structure and immediacy.

"It occurred to me that that was the way to keep it raw, to replicate the experience. What happens after a death is you keep going over it in your mind. You keep returning to it, trying to make it come out differently," she said.

Didion calls attention to the shifts in society that have made the act of grieving taboo in American culture and attributes this change to the "medicalization" of death and the denial of mortality.

"Death became something handled by experts. People died at home - now they die in ICUs," Didion said.

"None of us want to die or want the people we love to die. We want to imagine that we can fix this, that we can make it not happen. It makes us uncomfortable to be around situations in which it does happen."

At the end of the year narrated in her book, Didion fears that her memories of her husband will become less immediate and raw.

"That's one of the things that everyone who loses someone fears and one of the reasons they don't want time to pass," Didion said.

"There's a level at which you don't want to get over it. You want to remain raw. But in the natural course of things you can't stay alive and have it remain raw. So it does become more remote."

In a tragic twist of events, Quintana died six weeks before the book was published. But Didion chose not to alter "The Year of Magical Thinking," both for practical and personal reasons.

"It was already bound and in the warehouse, ready to ship," she said. "But it never entered my mind to hold it back or not to let it happen because, in a way, I saw that book as grieving for Quintana, as she was so ill through it, as for John."

Both readers and critics have responded in droves to this work, propelling it to the best-seller list and bestowing numerous awards on Didion, including the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

Click here for further coverage of the Festival Of Books

"It's a profound and moving book. It's essentially a long personal essay," said English Professor Mona Simpson. "Her strength is really that she's created her form in the essay, and she's got an unmistakable personal, emphatic style in which she writes."

Yet Didion remains remarkably unaffected by success, continuing to measure each work on a personal scale. She once remarked in an interview with writer Dave Eggers that the only time she felt truly successful was when "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz used her daughter's name in one of his comics.

"I couldn't believe it. I felt really blessed," Didion said, laughing. "With my own work, clearly I have achieved some success in the world. But yes, you still feel like you could do everything a little better than you're doing it, or a whole lot better. Nothing ever quite gets to where you think it should get."

At the Festival of Books, Didion will appear alongside hundreds of authors, many of whom look to her for inspiration. But when asked if she ever compares her work to theirs, Didion responds emphatically.

"No. I would lose out if I measured myself against other writers," she said.

Her response conveys her trademark dry humor and wit, which make a conversation with a literary giant such as Didion down-to-earth and accessible.

"The thing I particularly love (about Didion) is that she's quite ironic and funny, in a quiet, very powerful way," Simpson said.

One writer in particular Didion looks forward to seeing at the festival is her old friend, Gay Talese. Both got their start in journalism writing pieces in a style that later came to be tagged "New Journalism."

"I never thought New Journalism existed. I just thought it was a catchphrase that Tom Wolfe invented," Didion said. "What I mean is, it wasn't anything particularly new, what all of us in our different ways were doing."

In her distinct way, Didion made a name for herself as an astute essayist, capturing the craziness of the '60s and the paradoxical nature of California, among many other subjects.

And while Didion said she always knew she wanted to be a writer (aside from a very brief fascination with acting), her experience in journalism significantly shaped her inimitable perspective.

"When I started doing pieces, it just opened up a whole new world to me," she said.

"It was interesting to get out into the world and see things and try to make sense of them. It was really useful to me because it forced me to put myself into situations and talk to people who I normally might not have the opportunity to talk to."

She brought the art of skillful observation and analysis to all her subsequent works, from nonfiction to novels, up through "The Year of Magical Thinking," where she reads different theories on grief from Freud to Emily Post.

While many have asked her how she could continue writing after her husband's death, Didion knew she needed to write just to get through it.

"Writing is really the only way I know how to think. I can't think unless I'm actually writing, forcing myself to make the transition, to make it work," she said. "To me it's a method of thinking, and the only one I have."

In one of her early collections of essays, "The White Album," Didion mentions Paul Ferguson, who while serving a life sentence for murder on death row, had taken up writing to help him "reflect on experience and see what it means."

At the end of the essay, Didion admits that "writing has not yet helped me to see what it means."

Yet over 30 years later, after enduring the deaths of her husband and daughter and completing "The Year of Magical Thinking," Didion has finally come to understand the meaning of experience.

"Absolutely," Didion said. "Writing (the book) did enable me to reflect on experience in a real way."