Didion's writing is crisp and raw. I don't know if I have ever read such an intimate book before. To be so honest about one's internal disingenuity with oneself —no matter that the hiding of the truth is at times a necessary coping mechanism— must be a difficult process, though one with the promise of some degree of catharsis. To watch the process through Didion's keen eyes, I feel like I understand grief better.
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 misconstrue the nature of even those few day or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the 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.
I suspect this book will come back to me when I, inevitably, face losses of my own and it is the kind of book that I can imagine giving to someone working though their own grief. It's not a blueprint for how to grieve, but it's another howl in the wilderness to remind you that you are not alone. To me, that is one of the best things that a writer can accomplish.
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.