Williams told me, "I didn't know what my boundaries were for a long time, which made interviews feel very unsafe. I can talk about grief, because that's mine; about single parenting; about trying to balance work and kids. But what I don't have to talk about is what happened between Heath and me in our relationship''.
On a more concrete level, speaking with Williams involves meeting her at a variety of neutral locations, urban and rural. In my case, the process culminated in a visit to the upstate house, where she and her three-year-old daughter have spent a part of the last year trying to restore equilibrium to lives rocked by heartbreak and grief. "I have been severely accident-prone over the past twelve months. I fell downstairs, broke a toe, put my fingers in a blender—seriously distracted." While Matilda was in a play group, her mother would be faced with the stark existential question "How am I going to get through the day?" Often, what she did was "cry, nap, sit and stare, try to figure out what to make her for dinner, talk to friends on the phone." She says, "I was holding it together by a string and a paper clip in the fall and winter. I didn't know if I could keep it all together."
Although she has been an actress since the age of ten (she was born in Montana and raised in San Diego, from which her parents would take her to Los Angeles for auditions), was legally emancipated at the age of fifteen from her middle-class family ("I didn't grow up in a house with a lot of cool music or paintings, but my dad had good books"), and never went to college, Williams is clearly intellectually resourceful and in possession of a rich personal hinterland. Ryan Gosling, who plays her husband in Derek Cianfrance's forthcoming Blue Valentine, says, "She's like Montana. If you want to get anywhere in Montana, you have to sit tight. You're on Montana time. It's very beautiful, but it's vast. If you want to get somewhere with Michelle, you really have to be patient. She's so vast. You really have to sit back and enjoy the view. There's so much going on internally, so much ground to cover." She is bookish and cerebral. "In North Carolina [where Dawson's Creek was shot], I'd sit on the floor of Barnes & Noble and work my way through the shelves." She read, among others, Philip Roth: "I like American Pastoral the best, but Sabbath's Theater did my head in." (Says the artist Dan Estabrook, a dear old friend, "Her time on Dawson's Creek was marked by reading and reading and reading—she was always recommending books to bartenders.") Nowadays "I read poetry. I find a poet I like and then read the poets they like." Hence Galway Kinnell and Mary Oliver and Frank O'Hara. She is a huge fan, musically, of Leonard Cohen and of Antony and the Johnsons. Currently, in preparation for Reichardt's next movie, which is set on the Oregon Trail in pioneer times, she is plowing through a bedside stack of tomes about the American frontier. There is also an open volume of Doris Lessing in Matilda's playroom, and Williams warmly recommended to me (as she has to many of her friends) Rebecca Solnit's elegant meditation on loss and its possibilities, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Not surprisingly, six months after Ledger's death, the grief-stricken Williams turned to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. "I just don't see the upside to this," she says. "You console yourself by saying it's all a deepening process. But it's weird. After the first year, the pain is less intense; it's less immediate. But the magical thinking goes away, too. And that's a whole new reckoning. But every time I really miss him and wonder where he's gone, I just look at her''.
Whether or not Williams wants to talk about it, it's clear that she loved Ledger and that her grieving has been twofold: There was death, but before that there was the loss of her partner and the dream of an intact family, a loss that Williams, it's pretty clear, did not want. "Brokeback Mountain was an unrepeatable moment in time, a very charmed time in my life. I was in love; I was in a movie I was proud to be a part of, and with a beautiful brand-new baby. Everything was good in that moment." After the split, she did everything to get away, including taking on a film in Sweden. "I just didn't want to be at home. Geography is a great solution for heartbreak.
The role that she now plays with extraordinary style and care is that of a young single parent. She is no longer with director Spike Jonze: "The timing was impossible. I thought falling in love again was the only thing that was going to save me from the pain. This erroneous idea: It just makes things more complicated." And dating with a kid? "I obviously don't know how to do it." But she's not complaining. "I'm falling more and more in love with her," she says of Matilda, "and I think she deserves the bulk of my attention. We're lucky. I can work. She can go to a good school. There's a lot there for her. And she can know her dad in so many ways, and so many of his friends who will be able to tell her so many stories. His friends, his family—they were a big part of his life, and they will be a big part of her life." We are sitting on her porch watching sunflowers open to the sky. "I feel hopeful and grateful. For a while I thought we had lost everything. It makes you want to love better and live better and treat people better." And she adds, "There is a great Gloria Steinem quote—and I'm paraphrasing—'Become the man you want to marry.' I've taken that on. What qualities do I find attractive, and can I find them in myself? What am I missing? Can I be that for myself?"
I'm betting she can