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

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

Summary: A memoir of grief and remembrance of Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne.

They had just arrived home after visiting their daughter Quintana, in intensive care fighting pneumonia and septic shock. Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, were talking while he was enjoying a drink and she was preparing dinner. And then he wasn’t talking. She turned to find him slumped over the table, victim to a massive coronary called “the widow maker.” It was December 30, 2003.

In this memoir, begun in October of 2004, Didion recounts her grief journey over that first year beginning with the efforts of the paramedics, the trip to the hospital, the pronouncement of death, and receiving his effects, and returning to an show more empty apartment. Didion turns her gifts to describing one of the most difficult of human experiences:

“Grief 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.”

She titles the memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, reflecting a belief that somehow he could come back. She refrains from giving away his shoes because he will need them when he comes back. Obituaries disturb her because she fears she buried him alive. She replays the events of the night as if something different might have saved his life, yet he was likely gone from the moment he slumped over, as she eventually learns.

Drawing upon grief research, she chronicles her own descent into the kind of temporary insanity of grief. She struggles to finish a piece of writing because the two of them had always discussed each other’s writing and she’s waiting for that conversation that will not come. Later, when her daughter suffers a stroke in Los Angeles, she describes returning to the city in which she and John had once lived. and avoiding all the places that would awaken memories (“the vortex effect”) of him. She describes the look of “extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness” in the eyes of the bereaved and the memories that visit unannounced and her response:

“I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs.

I wanted to scream.

I wanted him back.”

Quintana’s serious condition offers a kind of diversion as she immerses herself in clinical materials and becomes her daughter’s advocate. Was this just a desperate effort to stave off further grief? To keep at bay the grief at the door? A mother’s love? Probably all three.

Yet she cannot help remembering. The birthday gift twenty-five days before he died. The trip to Paris John thought he must take or never go. Did he have a presentiment of his death? That is another theme, unresolved in the memoir.

Then there is the unending character of grief. It is not for a few days or weeks. Yet as the year ebbs to an end, she comes to some resolution to her “magical thinking.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive; we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

“I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”

Most of all, Didion explores the special kind of grief of that comes of two people sharing many years together. Is this the price exacted for many years of shared love, shared memories, of lives intertwined? I’ve known the widower beside himself with grief, losing the partner of over sixty years. It’s most likely that one of us will bear this grief in my own marriage. Reading Didion’s unvarnished and quietly eloquent account alerts us to that. But it doesn’t prepare us. What can?

But for those who grieve, and who go through all the changes Didion experiences, she helps us understand that this is just what it is like. Sometimes it helps to know we are not alone when we find ourselves alone. show less

This is a valuable piece of writing on grief. In December 2003, her husband has a massive heart attack at the dinner table and dies. At the same time, their daughter is in ICU with pneumonia. Over the course of the next year, she goes through an emotional wringer, dealing with the grief and the health issues of her daughter. She tries to make sens of the emotions and thinking she is experiencing, by reference to her peer group, her parents' generation and reading. I was particularly struck by the book on grief etiquette and how that has changed. Some of what she reported I recognised from the loss of my father (the shock, the bliss of forgetting and the pain of remembering, being side swiped). There is little writing on the nature of show more grief in the modern age, when faith is not the support it once may have been and when death is kept out of sight; this feels to be a valuable contribution to the subject. show less

"Time is the school in which we learn."

This is the story of a year of Didion's life - the year started by the death of her husband. A very precise account of the experience of grief, with sections on vortices of grief (the memories, items and events that pull us back into grief when we think we have overcome it), the physiological effects (cognitive failures, cold) and assorted other ponderings. I found the couple of pages on why we consider grief to be a condition to be overcome and a healing process at the same time spot-on.

It is an extremely personal account, and not just of her own life during that year - there are so many names of friends included (one presumes real as they all seem to be personages of modern American literature) show more and her daughter's assorted medical emergencies in the year are recounted in some detail. Of course there are some details which are omitted, and their omission is obvious (her daughter's occupation, information about her mother and father, and there is a reference to her daughter's adoption which is then never explained).

Didion's selection of events to be included is selective, and is clearly selected to fit the theme of her book, that is, her recognition of her altered mental state due to grief, her wishes to be able to change history. It's part memoir, part examination of a particular phenomenon through personal events - not unlike Happier At Home, or Sleeping Naked is Green (though those were happier topics).

The title took a long time to make sense to me, until Didion admits (late in the book) that she had been trying to keep life the same, to bring John back, to freeze time just before he died. The penultimate chapter on his last few days - her horror at obliterating his last dictionary search, working her way through the reading pile next to his chair and finding a newspaper with a date in the New Year (after he died); Didion writes the moments very well.

It's definitely worth reading and is beautifully written, but I did not find it as moving as I expected, somehow - less moving than The End of Your Life Book Club and similar works.

I think I will read Blue Nights, another work of non-fiction which follows this one chronologically, but I won't hurry to buy it. show less

I had no idea what I was embarking in with this book. While it is on the difficult topics of death and illness of loved ones, Didion strikes the balance of heightened emotion, fond memories, coping mechanisms and journalistic approach - a unique and compelling way of describing some of the toughest moments in a person's life. It is never pitying but it is an open account of the myriad of emotions and stages that the author went through. A remarkably authentic, interesting, and touching read.

I didn't choose this book. I didn't really want to read it. But one of my reading groups chose it as their January book. So. I started it last night and felt compelled to finish it this morning.

Just in case you haven't seen the multiple reviews/awards nominations/etc., this book is about how Joan Didion did (or didn't) cope with the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the near-fatal illness of her daughter. It is an amazing book. Didion very simply describes her grief; it was not loud or public, but quietly devastating.

I haven't experienced grief like this personally, but I've watched my grandmother deal with it over the past couple of years. And I think I understand it a little better now. Didion clearly explains how we've show more lost sight of how to handle death and the grieving and mourning that come with it. We expect everyone to just "deal with it" and move on with their lives, which is often the last thing the survivor is able to do.

I almost didn't read this because I thought it would be too depressing. After finishing it, I don't feel that it was depressing at all. I think for someone who's recently lost a spouse, this book might help, if only because it might make them feel they weren't alone in their pain, that someone else had been there.

The most surprising part of the book to me was that Emily Post's 1922 book of etiquette offers the best practical advice and description of the physical and emotional trauma one suffers on a spouse's death. I wonder how much better off we'd all be if we followed her practical and caring advice in all instances today.

One passage really struck home with me. I'm the eternal optimist, and it sounds like Didion was too. In chapter 14, she writes:

"I just can't see the upside in this," I heard myself say by way of explanation.

Later he said that if John had been sitting in the office he would have found this funny, as he himself had found it. "Of course, I knew what you meant to say, and John would have known too, you meant to say you couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel."

I agreed, but this was not in fact the case.

I had meant pretty much exactly what I said: I couldn't see the upside in this.

There's more, but really, you should read it yourself.

After my initial reluctance, I have to give this book a very high recommendation. I'd be interested in what others thought of it too. show less