The Year of Magical Thinking is not fiction; it's a cross between a memoir and a series of essays that chronicle the year in which Joan Didion lost her husband John Gregory Dunne (also a writer) and her daughter suffered severe illness. It is like a novel in that there are themes which recur throughout, as Didion's thoughts cycle again and again along the same track...as thoughts tend to do in times of trauma. But with the lucid insight of a writer, Didion is aware of the cyclical quality of her thoughts, the plunge into near-madness wrought by her grief and how it is manifest in her behavior. This book reads partly as an attempt to make sense of the cycle, to attain some sanity in the face of irrevocable loss.
This is very much a work of our time. In contrast to Tennyson's In Memoriam, in which the poet's passionate struggle with loss is at last resolved with a strengthening of his spirituality, Didion acknowledges that she has no answers and that the loss has left a void that is complete. She has nothing to say about religion or heaven--and in fact she is Episcopalian--but her conviction seems to be that death is an ultimate end; that loss is forever. Like In Memoriam, Didion is confronted with what she refers to as "meaninglessness"; but unlike Tennyson, Didion doesn't find meaning to comfort her. By the end of the book she is as cold and alone as when it began.
Didion describes herself as someone who looks to information in order to regain her sense of control, and this is exemplified in her insistence on an autopsy for her husband: by understanding exactly how his death occurred, she hoped to take control of it within her own mind. After his death she finds out every possible fact about heart attacks, even though the knowledge can no longer serve a practical purpose.
This personality trait of Didion's runs throughout the entire book--it is in fact a possible explanation for the existence of the book. By analyzing her own grief, by depicting the frozen landscape of loss as it is experienced, Didion seems to be seeking a way to gain control over it. This might be one reason why by the end, she writes that she doesn't want to finish the book.
The technique of the book is flawless. Already on the day of his death, Joan Didion wrote in her notes: "You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity." Ironically--or perhaps because of her awareness of self-pity--there isn't a smidgeon of self-pity here in this book, even though few would blame her if there was. If tears are mentioned at all, it is with clinical detachment. The language is absolutely restrained; when Didion is pulled into a memory that will lead to an onslaught of grief, she refers to this peril as "the vortex." It is left to the reader to imagine the agony contained within that vortex; Didion doesn't tell us. It is by focusing all her energies on avoiding the vortex that Didion makes clear just how devastating it is.
Another outstanding quality in this book, which goes hand in hand with its lack of self-pity, is the author's unflinching honesty: about herself, about her relationship. Even in the midst of overwhelming grief, Didion does not sentimentalize herself and she doesn't even sentimentalize her relationship. Instead she admits that not everything was perfect, that she herself is not perfect, and she makes no excuses. Somehow as a result of that honesty, the strength of her marriage is conveyed all the more clearly.
This book deals with life's biggest questions, its deepest challenges, but in language as clear and simple as cut crystal. The repeated rhythms of its themes, the refrain of Didion's words to herself intertwined with her dead husband's words to her, create the feeling of a poem set in barren spaces. This is a book that combines an intellectual analysis of grief with the full emotional weight of loss, and does so beautifully.
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