My Thoughts on The Year of Magical Thinking
Judge if you must, but The Year of Magical Thinking was my first introduction to Joan Didion and her work. I did not know much about the woman, her life, or her family. So when I began this book, I had no real expectations for what I was about to encounter. I did at least know her name, of course, and I recognized there was a fair amount of power behind it, so I anticipated some evidence of that.
In preparation for my Watson year, I’ve been compiling a reading list of books and articles related to grief and loss that I have heard of, that have come up in my research, or that have been recommended to me. Surprisingly, now is the first time since I began this list in February 2021 that I actually have the available time and energy to pick up any of these books. Upon opening my go-to library app, I saw that The Year of Magical Thinking was available to borrow. But … as an audiobook only. Now, I have to say, I actually tend to prefer audiobooks in most scenarios. The best situation, in my opinion, is to have both the audio and text version of a book available simultaneously to listen and follow along at the same time. This allows me to go back and reread passages, find quotes that resonate with me, and connect with the meaning of the text as it appears on the page and sounds out loud. However, I made do with what was accessible to me. I decided to sit on a bench in the metroparks next to a babbling stream and listen to the recording start to finish.
About the Book
On December 30, 2003, Joan’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died in the couple’s New York apartment, shortly after returning from the hospital to visit their comatose daughter Quintana. Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking between October 4 and December 31, 2004, a year and a day following the death of her husband. I mention this because, given the timeline, one would anticipate The Year of Magical Thinking to function as a diary of sorts. But Didion seems to simultaneously be living in the “year of magical thinking” while reflecting on, analyzing, and wrapping it up as complete by the end of the year. I found this caused an interesting tension during the book as I read it. The rawness and immediacy of Didion’s grief was not felt through the intense emotion that one would expect. It was, in my opinion, expressed through the lack of it. The book had a marked sense of stoicism; some even described Didion as “cold.”
There is no right or wrong way to grieve. For Joan Didion, it seems as though the act of writing The Year of Magical Thinking was a means to process the grief, but from a distance. She intellectualized grief. There is a vulnerability within that. There is a message in that. Throughout the book, Didion highlights how she appeared to cope well and did everything that she was “supposed” to do to move through her loss, giving the illusion of accepting it, and at times even fooling herself. But she also highlights the illogical behaviors she demonstrated in the months following John’s death. She held onto his shoes in the closet. Of course, “he would need shoes if he were to return.” To me, this book seemed to highlight that there is a distinction between knowing/understanding and believing. Didion knew that her husband had died. She had watched it happen. And, thus, she could write about it, analyze it, dissect it. But she had not yet believed it. That brought on her “magical thinking” and what I suspect is the distance that other readers sensed from her.
Despite Didion’s awareness of this magical thinking in the year following the death of her husband, and the lack of sense she notices in it, she cannot prevent herself from continuing to engage in it. She analyzes it, researches it, and is even, at times, fairly critical of it. But throughout the year, she still notices moments where she has fallen prey to these thoughts. Toward the end of the book, she realizes that the majority of 2004 for her was spent trying to reconstruct the days and memories from 2003. She honed in on big moments, but more intently dwelled on the small minutiae of daily living with her husband and daughter. She tried desperately to recall the exact details of conversations and pin events to their precise dates as a catalog and calendar of the final 365 days she shared with John. She counted back the time from his death, trying to perfectly remember his final hours and how they were spent. Then she concludes the book. On December 31, 2004. She is unable to create a retrospective itinerary for that day the year prior with John. The year prior, John was dead. So she stops the book there. With this realization, she seems to have decided to put an end to the “year of magical thinking” and the hope that John would come back to life. There is a hint at her entering a new phase of her grief in this conclusion.
My Review
I found The Year of Magical Thinking to be an insightful read. From other books on loss that I read, this one seems to sit at an interesting intersection. It is a powerful memoir of Joan Didion’s own bereavement journey, with striking messages about loss that linger below the surface. At the same time, since Didion seemed to intellectualize grief as a way to process it, The Year of Magical Thinking also offers a more philosophical discussion on the topic, one that is not often found in the same manner in personal stories. As she wrestles with her own journey, like many others, she questions whether her experiences are normal, typical, or expected. She shares several times in the book, “In times of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.” Intermixed with her own musings is in a type of conversation with others - writers, psychologists, religious figures. She weaves quotes from these scholars into her book to examine death, grief, and loss on another level. In reviews of this text you may see online, the jury is split. About half of readers love the work and the rest are turned off by it. Most seem to cite the name dropping, sense of privilege, and overall sense that Didion is out of touch with reality and the plight of the everyday man as the source of their dislike. I will say, there is a lot of name-dropping in this book - of stars, fancy hotels, luxury vacation destinations, five-star restaurants, and an overall flaunting of a lifestyle that is unknown to the vast majority. There is not often much recognition of this privilege in the book either. To me, this all seemed to be tied to the passage I pasted below.
“One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew, whether in New York or in California or in other places, shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice. The management skills of these people were in fact prodigious. The power of their telephone numbers was in fact unmatched. I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events. If my mother was suddenly hospitalized in Tunis I could arrange for the American consul to bring her English-language newspapers and get her onto an Air France flight to meet my brother in Paris. If Quintana was suddenly stranded in the Nice airport I could arrange with someone at British Airways to get her onto a BA flight to meet her cousin in London. Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
While at some level she knew that her wealth, privilege, and connections could not protect her from the inevitable, on other levels she did not recognize this. This seems to be another moment of “magical thinking.” She knows that the circumstances of the life she lived would not protect her from the pain of losing her spouse. Yet there is a subconscious thought that her money, fame, and education would/could protect her and prevent this delusional type of grief. She expects herself to cope better than others because of the life that she has led. Within this, Didion highlights, even unintentionally, the privilege she has had in the grieving process - she has access to professionals to walk her through the events, she has housing, access to food, abundant support systems that will arrange gatherings to ensure she isn’t alone, fly to visit her, help her understand the process the follows a death. And yet she still struggles. Didion demonstrates that appearances aren’t what they seem. Many remarked on her coping and ability to handle the loss of her husband in the days, weeks, months following his death. They placed expectations on what should be the goal and strived for during grief. She met those expectations externally. Internally, she denied the loss and became trapped in her own magical thinking.
Overall, The Year of Magical Thinking demonstrates the absurdity of grief. It is packed with nuance and societal commentary both from the text itself and within the reactions it evokes.
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