In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.On December 30th, 2003, Joan Didion and her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, returned from the hospital where they had been visiting their daughter, Quintana Roo, who was in a medically induced coma. While having dinner, Dunne collapsed from a heart attack and died. On top of sudden widowhood, Didion spent the next several months tending to her sick daughter -- who was in and out of hospital -- and in the end it took the author eight months before she could deal with her husband's death the only way she knew how; by writing about it.
The Year of Magical Thinking is a book about grief and loss, and as my life has been mercifully free of these all too common phenomena so far, I couldn't perfectly relate on a personal level. Even the night that Dunne died, the social worker at the hospital referred to Didion as "a pretty cool customer" and that is how she remains: going "to the literature" to understand grief, Didion includes quotes from fiction and poetry, scientific journals -- even dispassionately quoting from her husband's and daughter's medical records -- but never baring her own soul, and therefore never teaching me about how her grief felt. This is a book that intellectualises the process of grief, and in examining her own mental processes, Didion does confess to "magical thinking": wondering if she should have interpreted different things her husband said (over their 40 years together) as premonitions of his death; wondering if she could have saved him the night he died; unable to throw out his shoes or move away in case he returned. Didion also described "the vortex": sudden triggers of memory that led her back to the various settings of her marriage, and in this way, providing a scant (and for the most part unsentimental) biography for the reader of her relationship with Dunne.
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant.And so Didion describes grief as a state of temporary mental illness, and as she did throughout her career -- being a pioneer of the New Journalism movement -- she investigates her topic (grief) through her own reaction to it (disordered thinking) and in this way creates a work that has an odd friction between the personal and the impersonal; the intellectual and the emotional. The language is spare and nearly clinical, but as Didion circles back over the same memories again and again, certain phrases keep reappearing (I love you more than one more day…For once in your life just let it go…I tell you I shall not live these two days) and serve to anchor the author to her own history.
As Didion said early on, the canon of literature on true grief is deficient and The Year of Magical Thinking contributes a slight overview of what has come before as well as the author's own experience. From reviews, I can see that this book has been useful to readers who have experienced loss, but for me, it feels like "you had to have been there to get it"; I didn't get too much out of this reading experience, even if I can recognise the art of this book's construction. Having won awards and rave newspaper reviews and serious literary examination, I'm deferring to the experts by giving four stars -- it would be more like three if I was simply rating my own reading experience.
