I just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking. I was attracted to the book because of the topic of grief and bereavement, but I don’t see it as a book that is only suited for those who have lost a husband or faced a potentially fatal illness in a child. It is a beautiful work of nonfiction - the creative expression of what Ms. Didion experienced during her first year of widowhood is called “taut,” by Publisher’s Weekly, “lacerating yet peculiarly stirring,” by The Washington Post, and “a stunning book of electric honesty and passion,” by Random House. It is that and much more.
The Year of Magical Thinking, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005, starts immediately with what Ms. Didion must now view as the turning point in her life: Her husband’s, author John Gregory Dunne, heart attack and subsequent death. In her recording of the events of that evening, the reader can’t help but feel the unreal and almost surreal emotions that memories of this nature imprint on our minds.
It was clear during the course of the book that Didion, like most people who lose a loved one (particularly if they are present at the death), was trying to come to terms with what had happened. I felt her attempts at putting the event of heart attack, the paramedics and then being told her husband was dead, into some sort of reality that could make sense, and at first she was unsuccessful. She just could not wrap her brain around the fact that her husband and the man she had worked with for 40 years, was suddenly absent.
To complicate matters in Didion’s life, her daughter became seriously ill, and while the newly widowed woman was trying to trying to cope with moving from wife to widow, she was also trying to save her daughter’s life. Perhaps her grip on reality, as tenuous as it seemed at times, was maintained by the involvement in her daughter’s medical care - it was a touch of reality in an otherwise unreal world.
I was particularly struck by Didion’s realization of “pathological bereavement,” which is something that has just recently been recognized by the medical community. Grief can knock our normal everyday thinking, a few notches to the left, and we are never the same. Didion, like millions of others, did learn to live with the grief but her continual wish that he would return, illustrating by refusing to dispose of her husband’s shoes (he would need them when he came back), so honestly faces the unresolved issues that death brings into our lives.
The remainder of the book deals with the struggle Didion endured as she coped with the loss of her life partner and the fight for her only child’s survival.** The book was written approximately 18 months after John Dunne’s death, and her ability to step outside of the unreality to observe herself and the reaction of our society to grief, is amazing.
As usual, Didion uncanny ability to capture the nature of the human mind and emotions, is paramount in this book. Her investigative abilities show clearly; she seems to ask herself questions that a person can barely even imagine thinking, let alone writing, in such a public forum.
The book has garned some criticism because of the economic bracket that Didion and Dunne lived in, but I did not find that to be a factor in my feelings about the book. Death brings us all to the same level. Whether one lives in a penthouse or a small apartment, the experience of loss is the same. Death is the great equalizer, and has no respect of financial status.
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
**Although the book ends with the impression that Didion’s daughter did survive, as she was improving dramatically, she did pass away in 2005.
New York Times Book Review: The Year of Magical Thinking
Reader’s Guide from Random House
National Book Foundation
Joan Didion on Wikipedia
Reading Guide from Reading Group Guides
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I have been writing professionally for about a decade now. In my “previous life,” I was a nurse but fortunately, I also studied journalism and have had an interest in literature, both American and European, since… well, forever. When I left nursing, I decided to just chase my own dream and stepped out on the proverbial limb and began writing for a living. There are days I can’t believe how fortunate I am and there are days I fight for every word. I have written freelance for several publications, a textbook publisher and have one book on the market about autism. I now am blogging about the things that I love the most and wish to share.