The Year of Magical Thinking

this is really beautiful, and not in the way that i generally find books beautiful. her writing is great but it's not particularly lyrical, it's just so, so good. the way she writes this experience, the way her memories weave between the mundane and the extraordinary awfulness of grief is expertly done. i thought this was such a hard and important book and one that i'm going to save to return to when it's my turn for grief to come to me. i imagine it will feel like being seen and understood in such a crucial way.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We show more misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing.' A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to 'get through it,' rise to the occasion, exhibit the 'strength' that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact that (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself." show less

After I began reading this book, Facebook's birthday corner was showing my father's name. Dad won't be checking his wall from the grave, but still .... Joan Didion knew her husband John Gregory Dunne was dead of a heart attack, but on some level it didn't quite register that Dunne wouldn't come back or couldn't have been brought back. Didion triangulates this murky psychological territory, circling back from various angles, in waves that that seems to track with the stages of grief. By her account Didion and Dunne both would reread novels just to study the author's technique. That attention to craft suggests how she makes this subject so accessible, and why the last paragraph tempted me to start over.

Easily the best work I’ve ever read by Didion. Some of her quirks are there to delight or frustrate familiar readers, but unlike much of her writing—this isn’t a detached, vapid, all action-off-page kind of work. This work clearly, often beautifully, shows how the mind operates in times of grief, morning, and loss. The writer’s clear explanation and detailed mental processing can certainly help any reader. I wasn’t a big fan of her only-style, emptiness aesthetic, but this has to be her masterpiece and it is an important contribution to this field.

I've had this one kicking around for a while. And it's also the second copy to have passed through my hands, the first one unread. I was obviously reluctant to read it, given its subject matter. Joan Didion, an American journalist and writer, describing her year of grief - and inability to think, behave, or act one hundred percent rationally - following the sudden death of her much loved husband. Whoa, barrel of laughs there.

Of course, it wasn't a barrel of laughs at all (spot on the money there), and I was reduced to tears on a number of occasions (picture if you will, me sitting on the sofa, saying "and... and... and... *sob* she kept his shoes because he might... might... might... *hiccup* need them when he came back, and he's never show more coming back... *wail*" etc).

But, while it was obviously an exercise in coming to terms with her deep grief at such a loss (and at a time when her entire life seemed to be going pear-shaped around her), it was also a paean to her husband, to their long marriage and life together. She didn't flinch from the hiccups that occur in any long-term relationship, but it was a wonderful marriage and a wonderful description of what I hope many people get to experience in their life.

Being a bit of a data-freak myself (and coming from a science background), I enjoyed her "research" side of things, when she got waylaid by facts and scientific papers about grief and mourning.

Being the sister of a doctor, I will never lend this to my sister, as she would loathe Didion's need to control everything in the hospital, and her positive smugness when she "won" the minor battles. While it was good reading about it (from the point of view of having been a patient myself, and dealing with the occasional doctor who treats you as if you have the IQ of a retarded amoeba), overall I had more sympathy with the medical profession in this case.

Finally, I thought this was a positively necessary book, given our modern society's need to sanitise death and to be rather embarrassed by other people's grief. I'm still embarrassed by other people's grief (it'll take more than one book to undo that bit of my anal buttoned-down personality), but I hope in the future I will not be mortified by my own grief, should I ever have to go through what Didion did. show less

This 'grief memoir', of sorts, chronicles the year following the death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, from a massive heart attack on December 30, 2003, while the couple's only daughter, Quintana, lay unconscious in a nearby hospital suffering from pneumonia and septic shock. Dunne and Didion had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years, and Dunne's death propelled Didion into a state she calls "magical thinking." Far from morose, this book really gripped me: the idea that one moment your life is enchanted, the next, you find yourself alone. Didion faces finality with courage and candor...and at times a frailty that brings the fragility and beauty of life bubbling to the surface.

Didion's writing always makes me think of a Faberge egg. At once so elegant, with every word placed with a jeweler's precision, and also so artificial. I've read a couple of her novels, some of her essays, and although I am in awe at her skill with structure, language, and subtext, and the control with which she arranges her words, I'm never left wanting to read more. In this memoir, her fierce intelligence, her rationalism all come out on the page. Her emotion, less so. I am left to assume what I would be feeling in a similar circumstance. It is only because I already know how rational and controlled she is that I can sense her distress as her rationality and control fail to (in her words), "manage the situation." When her rationality show more fails, period. If I did not already know these things about Joan Didion, I would define her as the social worker in the hospital defined her, as a "cool customer." But these are the only weapons she has to grapple with the terrible tsunami of grief. And when her daughter falls ill, it is these weapons that enable her to again, manage the situation.

I was also struck by her position and privilege. Her matter-of-factness when speaking of the people she knows who "have influence at State or Justice," her ability to fly to Paris or Honolulu at essentially a moment's notice, her coterie of friends and family who have houses in various places and where she can ask for permission to stay as she keeps a vigil over her daughter in the hospital. The silver. The china. The wine. The many restaurants where she and her husband have eaten. Her privilege is on the page more than her passion; and it isn't even that I mind so much -- it's that she seems so unconscious of it. And although none of that could prevent her husband from dying, or ease the pain of her loss, there is no question that it smoothed the path.

I read this right after I read Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and there couldn't be two books more different, although they have the common frame of grief. But each one served to illuminate the other. Joan Didion's loss caused her to have "cognitive deficiencies:" she misremembered dates and addresses and lost bits of the last days with her husband. Strayed's cognitive deficiencies took the form of drug use and infidelity. Didion picked up her pen, and Strayed picked up a backpack. But neither of them were in their right minds. show less

Mourning Becomes Magical
Review of the Kindle eBook edition (2009) of the original stage play (2007) adapted from the original hardcover The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Earlier this year, I listened to the recent recording of The Year of Magical Thinking (August 2020) in its audiobook revival by actress Vanessa Redgrave who had originated the role in the stage version in 2007. That performance by the 83-year-old Redgrave added an extra layer of pathos to the story of Joan Didion's mourning of her husband John Gregory Dunne and daughter Quintana Dunne.

Reading the text version now several months later, I still hear it as being performed by Vanessa Redgrave's voice in my head so it is difficult to separate the words from the performance. show more The one major thing that I noticed in the read-through was Didion's reference to magical thinking as part of ritual in ancient cultures i.e. if I do this, then this will appease the gods and then this other will happen. This is a small comfort to others in mourning that the somewhat crazed thinking that sometimes comes with it has been part of the human family for eons, but it is a comfort still the same. show less