The Year of Magical Thinking Lesson Plan

When Didion talks to Quintana's doctors at UCLA, how does she alter her vocabulary and tone, and why?

While Quintana is hospitalized, Didion buys and reads medical textbooks to try to better understand what is happening to her daughter. When she discusses Quintana's treatment with her doctors, though, Didion is careful not to use the terms she learns in the textbooks (instead of edema she says "waterlogged," for example), and frames all of her ideas as questions rather than suggestions. Didion does this because she recognizes that the doctors are more receptive to her ideas this way--if they come back the next day and suggest what she had implied, she knows she was...