PEEKING OUT FROM behind the hotel-room door are a pair of sunglasses — large and amber, with dark lenses like bug eyes. Hiding behind them is Joan Didion — the 67-year-old journalist, novelist, and screenwriter who, among other things, earned the distinction "Woman of the Year" in 1968 from the Los Angeles Times; swilled drinks with John Wayne in Mexico; visited Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton in the clink; hung out with acid-eating hippies in the Haight; crouched on the "cold, vinyl floor" of a Sunset Strip studio while tension mounted among the members of the Doors; and climbed down the slick slope of a Salvadoran carcass dump to inspect "maggoty masses of flesh, bone, hair." Now here she is, shielded by her stylemark sunglasses on a gusty, late-October day in Boston.

"I have a cold," she croaks, somewhat apologetically, turning her back and walking across her Four Seasons hotel room to a table holding two boxes of generic-brand cold medicine, a package of tissues, and a soft-cover copy of her latest work, Political Fictions (Vintage, 2001). In town to promote the book’s paperback release at an event held at the Boston Public Library — any Didion release seems to merit an occasion — she is snug in a gray zippered sweatshirt, black slacks, and simple black shoes. She drags a chair away from the makeshift desk so her low voice — "I tend to speak softly," she admits — will be audible from the room’s only other convenient seat, a nearby ottoman.

Today, a touch of the flu will have the New York City resident speaking lower than usual. But her cold is not the story here, nor are her sunglasses. The story — or the "narrative," as Didion likes to call the structure writers impose on events — takes place in the past, in locations like Newark’s Butler Aviation terminal, Miami’s Woodlawn Park Cemetery, Death Valley, San Francisco, Beverly Hills, Alcatraz, Honolulu, Malibu, New York City, the Sunset Strip. Even such a list, though, does not tell the whole story; the true setting of this narrative is the page. Nowhere else does the story exist in quite the same way.

But many writers have tried to limn Didion’s story. This time, the objective is to let her tell it herself.

Flipping through Didion’s six works of nonfiction and the essays within them — many of which are told through first-person narration — one learns that she is a descendant of aboriginal Californians ("Notes from a Native Daughter") and a Berkeley alumna ("On the Morning After the Sixties"). After college, she moved to New York City and lingered there ("the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power," as she portrayed it in "Goodbye to All That") for eight years before returning to the Golden State. She wed screenwriter John Gregory Dunne in 1964; they parented one child, Quintana Roo, and teetered on the edge of divorce in 1969 ("In the Islands"), but are still together today (the foreword to Political Fictions). Throughout her life, Didion has suffered from migraines, vertigo ("In Bed"), and multiple sclerosis ("The White Album"). Over the last 40 years, she’s endured many, many hotels ("On the Islands," "On Morality," the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, "Miami") and hotel lunches ("7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38"), and relied so often on room service that she’s framed life in terms of special deliveries ("On the Road," "The White Album").

Didion’s life in letters began early, back in college, when she won an essay contest for Vogue and consequently landed a job at the magazine — in advertising. "Then I threatened to quit, so I was put on the editorial side." A stint as features editor at Vogue followed, as did a first novel, Run River (1961), a biweekly column for Life, and regular reporting gigs for publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Holiday, and the New York Review of Books.

Didion acknowledges that the ’60s and ’70s generated a level of respect for journalism that has since vanished. "It was regarded as highly as fiction," she muses. "We thought there was something wonderful you could do with nonfiction."

What Didion did with nonfiction was dig for political and cultural truth in a deeply personal, and therefore idiosyncratic, way. In her seminal Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), a reportage collection widely considered to be a classic of 20th-century American journalism, she sifts through overheard words, casual conversations, and firsthand accounts — many of which were day-to-day details that would be lost on a less attentive listener — and meditates on their meaning, and sometimes their meaninglessness, through honest, often gripping, personal reflection. And she masterfully weaves seemingly disparate threads into collage-like contemplations (for example, a musing titled "On Morality," written for the American Scholar, connects Death Valley, a drunk-driving accident, the cannibalism of the Donner-Reed Party, and the modern ethic of conscience into an intriguing rumination on morality at its most primal).

But to hear Didion tell it, her early work was a jumble of paper scraps. "I didn’t know how to write when I first started. Every piece was like tabula rasa. I would really just reinvent the wheel. I really didn’t have any way of approaching a piece, so I’d write these leads that went on and on and on and on because I really didn’t know where I was going. The lead would end up being four or five pages of an eight- or 10-page piece, so everything was always kind of lumpy and unbalanced."

Then she adds, "When I started writing pieces better was when I started using a computer."

Better? When was that?

"1987."

Self-deprecation aside, Didion never seems to find redemption on the page. "If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest, I would go to that barricade," she wrote in The White Album, "and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending."

Some would call this jaded skepticism. Joan Didion does not. "I’m a realist," she says, giggling.

In Political Fictions, Didion is like a diagnostician whose razor-sharp instincts can detect heart disease by the rhythm of a pulse, throat cancer by the smell of breath. A dissection of political events like the 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, these New York Review of Books articles cut through the party lines, exclusionary tactics, and empty rhetoric endemic to American politics and expose the rotting core beneath the camera-pandering façade. Didion shines a penlight on what troubles our democracy, such as the utter unwillingness of the two major parties to address the issue of non-voters, the "disconnect" between the American populace and the government supposed to represent it, and the fact that political insiders have "congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process." Along the way, she also slaps around Mike Dukakis, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and Kenneth Starr, plus media bellwethers such as the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, Bob Woodward, and that recurrent talking head Cokie Roberts. ("At my husband’s urging, I went through and took out some of the Cokie Roberts references," she confesses laughingly.)

On stage at the BPL, when Alex Star, a Boston Globe editor, asks Didion about the book, he touches upon something rather telling.

"You’re very critical and skeptical about the way narrative and storytelling are used to shape our experiences in certain ways," Star says. "Of course you’re a writer and what you do is —"

"Make up stories," Didion interrupts.

"And perhaps your very strengths as a writer make it all the more possible to shape your experiences in certain ways. What do you say to the thought that you’re doing the same thing, you too are writing political fiction?"

"It’s kind of a phenomenon you can’t get around," Didion responds. "If I’m going to continue to write, I have to make the narrative. But I have to think. The way you rationalize it to yourself is by telling yourself that you’re trying to see it straight. You can never know whether you are not. Who knows? None of us may be seeing anything straight."

Obviously, what you expect someone to look like and what she does, in fact, look like matters very little, except that in Joan Didion’s case the dissonance between the two is surprising enough that it’s hard to brush aside," author Susan Orlean once noted. And it’s true: in person, Didion isn’t what her prose would lead you to expect.

First of all, she is miniature. Barely five feet tall, she doesn’t even fill a chair. But although she looks like she could slip between the seat cushions at any moment, Didion still tries to bury herself during interviews. Whether it’s by masking her eyes with huge shades or swathing herself in a cape-like wrap (as she does at her Boston Public Library appearance), Didion seems to be trying to disappear.

Despite her apparent unease with being the center of attention, she is often called "warm." She laughs frequently and girlishly; her giggle is giddy, high-pitched, and fluttering. She speaks slowly, deliberately, then stops, sometimes suddenly. Asked her thoughts on the state of magazine writing, she lets a full 10 seconds elapse before offering carefully chosen words. "The New York Review is great. There’s always something. If you’re stuck on an island or an airplane, it turns out there’s everything you want to read. The New Yorker is good." She pauses for three more seconds. "The Atlantic [Monthly] and Harper’s have pieces in every issue I see."

If she doesn’t particularly care for a question or a comment, she will politely sidestep it. At the BPL, a man in the audience asks Didion "to react to" a Jerry Brown quote he reads from a newspaper. She "reacts" by offering, "Hmm ... that’s really interesting. He has such an interesting mind."

When people ask her how long something took to write, Didion is vague if the answer is unflattering. The pieces in Political Fictions? "A long time." Her novel-length fiction? "It depends on the novel." Democracy? "It took me forever to write it, seeing that I kept getting to page 90 and stopping." The Last Thing He Wanted? "The plot was so complicated that I wrote it in three months. Because otherwise you couldn’t have kept the plot in mind."

And why hasn’t she published anything new since September 11? "I was supposed to do something about the Bush administration after they came in, but I couldn’t get a handle on it," Didion explains. "I kept thinking, ‘Well, this won’t gel, it’s too early, this will take form in a bit.’ Then after September 11, that’s when it began to take form. But after September 11, I was too shell-shocked at that very moment to engage it. And I didn’t quite feel ready to take that on. Now I do, I think, after I finish doing this tour, and get over my cold."

Yet she makes the process of writing fiction sound like hari-kari. "It’s such a long or intense period of not feeling cheerful." So what’s the difference between writing journalism and fiction? "You don’t wake up every morning — as you do when you’re writing a novel — with nothing. You don’t wake up asking yourself, ‘Why do I think I should do this? Just what this world needs — another novel.’ "

Then again, she makes the nonfiction process sound nearly as grueling. "I don’t like interviewing people at all," she says. "I just end up writing down my questions again, instead of writing down the person’s answer. So I design pieces where I don’t have to." And she professes to be terrible at using tape recorders. "I don’t use them very cleverly or very carefully. I was having lunch with someone in Miami when I was doing Miami, and the tape ran out, I discovered later, at the very point where he was telling me the crucial Iran-Contra point. But I could never use it, because I didn’t have it on tape. I didn’t trust my memory of it."

In the last 40 years, Didion has cast herself in multiple roles on the page: reporter, source, narrator, author, protagonist, creator. Less evident, but no less important to her craft, is that she introduces herself as literary persona — that the creator becomes the creation in the act of creating. That is not to say that Didion has fictionalized herself in print; rather, that art, in this case the art of writing and retrospection, has self-transformative power.

"I find it very hard to think without writing," she confirms. "A lot of stuff goes unexamined unless I have written about it."

The Didion delineated in her work is someone grounded enough to have had high-school friends who bummed around gas stations, neurotic enough to dread phone calls, laid-back enough to wear a bikini to the market, sociable enough to lounge around Los Angeles piano bars, conservative enough to have voted for Barry Goldwater, nonjudgmental enough to be welcomed by long-haired peyote pushers, well-connected enough to find kinship with former presidential candidate Jerry Brown, brave enough to slog around El Salvador during a civil war, fun-loving enough to appreciate Jesse Jackson partying after defeat in the 1988 California Democratic primary.

It’s through Didion’s role as a protagonist that people — readers and journalists specifically — think they know her, think they have a handle on the person behind the prose. Which is one of the reasons why, for the last 15 years, Didion has moved away from first-person accounts. "When I was writing those very personal essays, I was getting a lot of response on them and I was starting to feel as if I was a recipient of problems I couldn’t solve," she says. "I was inviting a personal response that I was unable to rise to." Which is another way of saying that she managed to create another entity on the page, something outside of herself that she couldn’t uphold in reality.

Didion’s performance on the page is also why people treat her like something of a sage. During the Q&A session at the BPL, audience members want to know if there is "hope" in improving the two major political parties. ("My sense is that you can’t change the existing parties as they are constituted.") They want to know how to inspire broader political dialogue. ("I don’t know, except by letting it trickle through. I don’t know any immediate way.") They want Didion’s prescriptions.

Yet she has never claimed to possess healing power, much less the temperament of a political leader. "I’ve never thought of myself as an activist," Didion says matter-of-factly. "I’ve never thought of myself as an organizer. Although I do think of myself as someone who wants to change peoples’ minds. I do recognize that there is kind of a disconnect there. But I don’t know exactly how to reconcile that."

After a five-second pause, she adds, "I don’t have any answers. I just think the first step is to point out the problems."

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com