The Year of Magical Thinking - 16 Down, 46 to Go

I’d doubt I’d enjoy hanging out with Joan Didion, but I have a boatload of sympathy for her after reading this intensely sad Pulitzer Prize winning memoir.  On December 30, 2003, she and husband John visited their flu stricken daughter at the hospital, went home for dinner, when John would collapse and die from a cardiac arrest. Trying to make sense of it all, Didion did what she’s done time and again in her essays and non-fiction work, she asked “Why?” and “How?”

 

The Year of Magical Thinking is an odyssey of the first year of grief and her path to acceptance when, in the spirit of the title, she imagined John would somehow come back and they’d be transported back to their days in Malibu or Honolulu tending to their healthy, innocent daughter. This unplanned transference is perfectly normal, a defense mechanism leading ultimately to acceptance and reconnection.

 

Didion’s greatest strength is constructively talking around the subject, not avoiding it exactly, but approaching it with as much dignity and distance as possible until additional stresses and more unpleasant mental associations prompt her breakdown. For all the intimate, hoity toity details of her days—her daydreams, her diet, the contents of her hard drive—she doesn’t truly let down her guard until around page 160.  Her methods are so meticulous and her narration so damn honest, I sense there's no other way the story would work. She spends the first few months trying so hard to control the situation, to invent a new reality or try to attain that elusive closure via narration. Then she lets go. About a year after the funeral, a sense of redemption and a stable frame of mind just kind of happen:

 

About five in the afternoon on the 24th I thought I could not do the evening but when the time came the evening did itself.

 

For a writer, mother and wife who has tried so hard to stay in control, that evening was a minor miracle.

 

Comments

[Lou]

This sounds depressing. However, I love, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" but I'm a sucker for essays. I'm also, in general, a sucker for creative non-fiction. Maybe I should check it out. My reading has been lacking as of late.