The Year of Magical Thinking was added to my library request list back in the fall, when it was appearing on one best of the year list after another. Before that, it hadn't been on my radar. I am not, generally speaking, a big reader of memoirs. And why would I read this one? Other than a passing familiarity with the names (Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne), I knew nothing about the author and her husband.
But it kept showing up on these lists, every list, a huge variety of lists. And the excerpts I read had the kind of beautiful, insightful simplicity that attracts me like a super-magnet. The bits I read made me want to read Didion's story about what she called her year of magical thinking, when her husband died suddenly even as their daughter lay in a coma.
I know nothing about grief, not really. I have been lucky. I can barely imagine what it would be like to live through the death of a spouse, or the potential death of a child, let alone at the same time. It seems a cruel universe that would put anyone in that place. This is a case where reality can get away things that fiction could not. And how else could anyone survive a year like this but with magical thinking? In the face of so much loss and uncertainty, how else would one cope except with imagining that it is all somehow different, something temporary? Didion's magical thinking manifests in a refusal to get rid of her husband's things; like a pharaoh, he may need those shoes when he comes back. Didion's ability to recall the clarity with which she thought these muddled thoughts is astonishing.
Reading this book, I felt a bit like a voyeur. I was attracted to this story of awfulness, like a highway rubbernecker. Didion, writing about the events after the fact, leaves her edges exposed. Inevitably, as in any profound experience, Didion winds up disoriented. Accustomed to being competent, capable, optimistic, and indestructible, she doesn't recognize herself in the shadows of grief. She reevaluates:
I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation. I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm. It occurs to me now that these were not even the songs of my generation. They were the songs, and the logic, of the generation or two that preceded my own. The score for my generation was Les Paul and Mary Ford, "How High the Moon," a different logic altogether. It also occurs to me, not an original thought but novel to me, that the logic of those songs was based on self-pity. The singer of the song about looking for the silver lining believes that clouds have come her way. The singer of the song about walking on through the storm assumes that the storm could otherwise take her down.
I can't imagine an outside observer not seeing Didion's sky that year as clouded. And yet it is such a fundamental coping mechanism, to be able to find a silver lining. Perhaps the titular magical thinking is a manifestation of that need to find something positive; if there is nothing positive in reality, it will simply have to be wished into existence.
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
great book isn't it? painful to read but somehow fascinating at the same time.
2 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Great writing, great review. I also have heard a lot about the book, seen it on lists--and now I'll definitely get a copy.
3 - Cass
It was an intimate read, but I felt like I was missing part of the story. I had to read up on the author and her husband on wikipedia, and then it made more sense to me. She writes with an honesty and simplicity that can help people understand the stages of grief. For a couple as intertwined as Didion and Dunne, it's a wonder she was able to keep on keeping on at all.
4 - terry
I found The Year of Magical Thinking the most indulgent and self-congratulatory account of grief and human trauma I've ever encountered. Ms. Didion's sensibility ranges from opacity to mawkishness. She seems to violate her husband's personal effects and 40-year committment to her at every paragraph, at every search for meaning. I was astounded. I read several reviews praising YMT and have read and admired Ms. Didion's works before. This is a terrible exception. Mr. Dunne is treated as object removed from a shelf to be examined for his usefulness, then returned till later. Ms. Didion's observations of the medical profession are provoked by genuine and legitimate doubts, but are presented sketchily, leaving us unsure what to make of those who provide health care and specialized medical attention for the rest of us. She ventures into diagnositic and interpretive realms of medicine on the basis of a few paragraphs of minimal, questionable research, and presents them as evidence of negligence or causative of increased suffering. But because I am not a physician, that is not my point. I am, however, a long-time reader of poetry, prose, history, philosophy, and nonfiction and Ms. Didion is simply unconvincing in the role of medical expert or of a caring family member. So many passages in YMT deserve so much more reflection and scrutiny, qualities for which she has been rightly acknowledged in the past. YMT is act of dismissing a loved one's presence, not of thoughtful contemplation.
There are some wonderful passages toward the end of the book, but by that time I had been so disappointed with the foregoing. Ms. Didion is capable - perhaps too capable at such a fragile period in anyone's life - of speaking to us from any number of detached positions and registers of false emotion. The refrains she uses throughout the book, in the form of short, elliptical phrases, in most instances, drop to the floor like a hammer rather than resonate human vulnerability as they are meant to.
I am deeply sorrowful for Ms. Didion's losses. It feels wrong to chastise an intelligent and well-meaning work in this way.
But I can only describe this as grief and disorientation within the comforts of affluence and privilege that most of us, also hard-working, will never see. Many of my friends and associates who have read or will read the book can't even afford health insurance; and if they "dropped dead" of heart failure at dinner would want to stay dead, the costs of treatment would be so impossible to meet.
This is where, perhaps, I found YMT most offensive. The presupposition on the part of Ms. Didion that her readers can afford to spend five weeks at the Beverly Wilshire, can paw away at a decision to go to Paris or not, that they are wearing underwear like Mr. Dunne's from Brooks Brothers, etc. If there was a designer label or cushy address or personal service or celebrity friend left out of this memoir of Ms. Didion's I can't imagine what or who it could be. Death, particularly the death of a loved one, is much too thorny and frightening a topic to allow for what Thorstein Veblen would have recognized as "pecuniary canons of taste." Ms. Didion is no Ma Joad.
Thank you for your attention.