The author and her late husband, John.
The Year of Magical Thinking Review. December, 2010.
“Grief is the most general of afflictions.”– Joan Didion
She can’t eat anything but scallion-and-ginger congee. She can’t give away his shoes, remove his voice from the answering machine or finish a piece that she knows he can’t edit. The irrational, psychologically and physiologically debilitating disease known as grief consumes her. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking isn’t a self-serving memoir about the death of her husband of almost 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, but an introspective and meditative look into the thought process of a woman stricken by grief. Didion, after all, often uses her pen to analyze her response to the world around her; this time she has produced writing that is more personal but more insightful than her other works. Through memory, poetry, and expert evaluation she explores her new world in the best way she knows: to make sense of it, to evaluate it, to bring it all together and write it down. She finds that grief is an inescapable part of being human.
The first thing Didion wrote after John collapsed on their Upper East Side living room floor after suffering a massive heart attack was only days later. “Life Changes in an instant. The ordinary instant.” Already, in a fog of shock after losing her husband, she shows Didion-esque clarity. That night, she and John had just returned from the hospital where their daughter, Quintana Roo, was in a coma after her flu turned into pneumonia that was followed by septic shock and a stroke. John read and had a Scotch, Didion made dinner. They were talking at the dinner table when he raised his left arm and fell silent in his chair. She thought he was joking. The demolition of life as she knew it occurred in an instant, during a routine that she and John habitually shared. “You sit down to dinner. And then gone.”
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion recalls her relationship with John, trying to understand her pain. Her use of repetition shows the constant obsessing over certain thoughts, conversations and memories. This process is familiar to those who have felt loss, but Didion process these emotions lucidly. For example, she recounts one summer, when she and John lived in Brentwood Park, California, numerous times throughout the book and we get an intimate look into their marriage. They would work, watch Tenko on TV, then John would read in the pool while Didion gardened, they would swim, work for a few more hours and then go out to eat at their favorite restaurant for a shrimp quesadilla with rice and beans. To help her identify the reason she keeps coming back to this particular summer, she cites The Merck Manual 16th Edition, that says the harder, “complicated grief,” or “pathological bereavement,” is caused in part when the couple is “unusually” dependent on one another. To Didion, their “dependent” relationship (when she was stuck in San Francisco for an extra night he flew in for dinner at their favorite restaurant and took a midnight flight back to Los Angeles) was not “unusually dependent,” but instead “unusually lucky.”
In the book, she examines John’s physical death as if to prove to that there was nothing she could have done to save him, drawing on medical records, doctor’s opinions and a meticulous rehashing of the moments that preceded his heart attack. We see the mental process of a woman coming to terms with reality, trying to understand what has happened. She consults poetry, sociological and psychological expertise and compares her experience to that of humanity, seeing how she measures up. To supplement the doctors’ cold analyses or the sociologist’s sweeping statements, Didion found reassurance in Emily Post, the twentieth century’s First Lady of etiquette, who described feeling cold as a symptom of grief the same way the Institute of Medicine’s 1984 compilation did, as total physiological change. She found that she measured up pretty evenly with the writers and experts throughout the ages. Her meticulous research helped her comprehend her experience, and when we read it, it can help us understand our own.
Didion’s battering pace, the repetitive fragments (“and then… gone”), and the way she so articulately looks at and listens to herself are made more effective coming from a woman who since the 1960s has been writing about loss: of parents and homeland in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, of landscape in Where I was From and of lovers in many of her novels. Didion, who is so thorough, precise and patient in her style, remains this way in The Year of Magical Thinking, but her self-analysis is interrupted by the snippets of phrases that preoccupy her. These insights into her mind (Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant) show the breaking-down of her capability to think rationally or fluidly. In this way, her pseudo-stream-of-consciousness style does a better job of channeling her emotional state than the emotions themselves, which are hard to describe.
Describing the death of her parents, she writes, “My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for awhile to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry.” But grief–put simply and movingly here– “is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” The Year of Magical Thinking is a look at what one day most people will experience: collapse, loss and loneliness. Most of us will have to dole out a loved one’s clothing, re-record the voicemail and speak into silence. By putting herself under a microscope at her most vulnerable time, Didion taps into our collective grief. Quintana died later that year, but Didion didn’t need to amend the book; her message remained the same. Sometimes we need writers like Didion to show us what we feel, so we too can measure up. But sometimes we just need a great read. This book accomplishes both.
E Carter 