I went into this book knowing it was going to be difficult. It’s Didion’s memoir of her husband’s death, but more importantly, of what came after. This book has gathered praise and acclaim for being an unflinching exploration of grief that tells Didion’s experience with an honesty rarely brought to the topic. That’s exactly what it does.
This is a small book. Unassuming. It has been sitting on my shelf for years, just blending in. It doesn’t stand out or demand attention; it doesn’t scream. Neither does Didion. Between these covers she shares her pain, but does it quietly. Slowly. With great care. Her writing style here is repetitive – she repeats key events and phrases as a way of stringing together the seemingly random memories and images that come to mind. The result is a realistic portrayal of how little sense can be made of a loss this profound.
Her husband died suddenly, at dinner, of a heart attack. But it wasn’t quite so sudden – he had been diagnosed with a heart problem years earlier and had a pacemaker put in to keep his heart functioning. This seemed to deeply affect his sense of his place in the world, but it didn’t have the same effect on Didion. She saw the diagnosis as a singular event: treated and resolved. He saw it as a future death sentence; one he couldn’t place on a timeline, but couldn’t escape.
In looking back, she wonders if he knew his time was running short. Did he know when he insisted they went to Paris because he was scared he’d never make it back there otherwise? This is a question she will never have an answer for.
Didion had, for the most part, a pretty unbelievable life. Charmed, you might say. She found a man whom she loved and who loved her for four decades. She built a career doing something she loved, and that took her to the centre of exciting and important events all over the world, into the company of some of the brightest stars, and behind the scenes working on location for several major films. She even adopted a beautiful baby girl who brought her and her husband untold joy and love.
In some ways this life she lived left her even less prepared for such a sudden and violent loss than the average person. She had a willfully naive view of the world, despite the horrors she’d seen in her reporting career. She held her personal life separate and assumed it to be immune from such horror. When her husband died, her daughter was in a coma in a nearby hospital (she recovered but suffered another major health issue shortly afterwards and died not long after her father – though that isn’t discussed in this book, despite its publication coming after her death). Her entire life, charmed as it may have been, had been blown up, and she was left trying to make sense of her new reality. Her husband had been her best friend, her partner, her protector. He had insulated her from the world and taken care of her. Without him, she was suddenly and irrevocably alone.
Her account of this experience, though deeply moving, feels like it’s being told with a reporter’s distance. While I can understand that putting on her familiar professional persona was probably the only approach that allowed her to tackle this project, it did make it harder to connect with her on as deep an emotional level as I had expected. It didn’t help that so many of her stories involve famous friends, fancy hotels and exotic travel. It’s her reality, her life experience, her truth. But it’s hard to connect to someone whose life feels so many light years away from what I am familiar with.
This is a hard review to write. It’s another case of there being a few things that made it hard for me to give this book full stars, but I nevertheless wanted to. I think it deserves a high rating because of the topic it deals with, but even more because of how hard it must have been to write, and how much pain Joan Didion was in while writing it. How much pain she must now live with. Her previously charmed life in no way lessens that, nor does it balance it out. Her experience of grief is raw, her account of it full of her own frailty and growing fear of all the bad things that could happen. Things that, before this, she was blind to. But now they are everywhere. She is afraid of slipping getting out of the shower. Of twisting her ankle while walking across the street. Of waking up, day after day, to the realization that her family is now just her. She talks of the cognitive impairment she experienced following her husband’s death. Of her deep denial that he was truly gone. Her inability to visit places that held strong memories of him.
This book is definitely an important one. I think anyone who has suffered a loss will find a lot to relate to here, deep emotional connection or no. And anyone who has suffered a trauma that has undermined their sense of safety and the assumption that tomorrow will bring good news – or that tomorrow will even come – will likewise recognize some of what she shares. I recognized her fear, and the shadow her husband lived under after his heart problems. I share those fears. That shadow. They will be with me for the rest of my life, whether it’s long one or, more likely, a short one. For that, I am grateful to Didion for writing this book. Was it perfect? No. But it didn’t need to be. It’s honest, and that is far more important.
‘An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief.’
From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year’s Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.” – Goodreads
Book Title: The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
Series: No
Edition: Paperback
Published By: Vintage International
Released: February 13, 2007 (first published September 1, 2005)
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Family, Death, Grief
Pages: 227
Date Read: November 10-16, 2019
Rating: 7/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.89/5 (125,778 ratings)