The Year of Magical Thinking is a touching yet distant book, an exhaustive reflection on illness, death, and the need for mourners to reconstruct the meaning of their own existence. In it, journalist and writer Joan Didion recounts her personal experience following the sudden death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne. In her first work of non-fiction, the author endeavors to dissect grief in a cerebral, sensory, accurate and controlled way.
The iconic text begins with the journalist’s first observations after the dramatic event: “Life changes fast…” Didion writes, “You sit down to dinner, and life as you know it ends”. Thus, the book exposes at a glance one of the most difficult maxims for human beings to accept: death appears when and where it is least expected.
Direct and forceful, the author recounts her reaction to the tragedy, the death, and the grieving process. The writer’s memoirs detail the 365 days that followed the loss of her life partner. In this sense, Joan Didion describes with tenacity the road she had to travel in order to accept the sudden death of her husband and the enormous challenge of reconfiguring her world.
In broad strokes, the dramatic event occurred in the midst of routine and everyday life. One night like any other, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, were preparing to share dinner in their New York apartment. Both were worried because their only daughter, Quintana Michael, in her thirties, was in intensive care diagnosed with pneumonia and septic shock.
Joan was mixing the salad and lighting the fireplace, when suddenly her husband went silent and collapsed in his chair with a crash. As in most emergencies, the paramedics, the ambulance, and the drive to the hospital proceed at top speed. Once at the clinical facility, the doctors reveal an irremediable truth: John has suffered a massive heart attack that has taken his life. This is the starting point of the book, one of the American writer’s most famous essays.
The author begins to write notes to herself. With her mind clouded and her heart overflowing, Didion uses the written word to manage the overwhelming experience of coping with the death of her spouse, while at the same time caring for her seriously ill daughter. In this way, writing becomes a territory of reflection that allows her, little by little, to mature her grief and to become aware of the loss as an irrevocable event.
Throughout the book, Didion meticulously reconstructs the lethal episode and intertwines the narrative with the most heartfelt memories of their life together. In this manner, she recalls their forty years of marriage, their inexhaustible passion for literature, the trips they enjoyed, the devoted upbringing they gave to their daughter, as well as the more subtle details of the couple.
In an eloquent paragraph, Didion expresses that this text should be seen as an “attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself”.
In some way, it was an exercise in catharsis that contributed decisively to her recovery.
One of the recurring themes in the book is the role of “partial denial” as a defense mechanism for the bereaved. And the fact is that, although Joan objectively understands the reality – John is deceased – part of her refuses to believe that her husband is not coming home.
In this regard, Didion complies with all the mortuary rituals, attends the funeral, observes the events directly, and even so, she clings to symbolic denial. In a certain manner, she immerses herself in “magical thinking” through which she hopes to reverse everything that has happened. Her only intention: to turn back time, to change the outcome.
It is noteworthy that the title of the text refers to Freud’s anthropological concept. In this regard, the psychoanalyst considered that magical thinking is a form of thought in which a disturbing or catastrophic reality is replaced by an invented psychic reality.
Unable to process the loss of her loved one, Didion imagines an alternative scenario. The writer longs to stay home alone so that John can return. She can’t find the courage to get rid of some of his shoes, assuming – in her magical thinking – that her husband will need them sooner or later. Nor does she dare to donate his organs for the same reason. Overcome by grief, Joan allows herself from time to time to fantasize like a child, allowing herself to believe that she can reverse the narrative.
In addition, this memoir also reflects a thorough investigation of death as an experience and the grieving process. Didion turns to clinical theory and literary classics in order to clarify her concerns and acquire sufficient knowledge to deal with her own pain. Thus, she consults whatever material is available to her, literary works, poems, professional essays, self-help guides, and scientific manuals. She takes refuge in Euripides, Shakespeare, Lamartine, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Elliott, C.S. Lewis, William Auden, D.H. Lawrence. However, everything is insufficient for her to face the emptiness, the existential hole after John’s death.
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead”, she concludes after months of deep reflection.
Didion admits that “magical thinking”, “partial denial”, and “insanity” begin to recede once she receives and studies John Gregory Dunne’s autopsy report. Although the journalist receives the report eleven months late, that knowledge is of essential importance to her in her process of acceptance. She says that knowing how and why her husband’s death had happened allows her to let go of her daydreams, self-deception and unrealistic longings.
The Year of Magical Thinking is a revealing meditation on the journey of the mourner. The text delves into sensitive issues, such as the breakdown of reality, emotional blunting, waves of sadness, acceptance of loss, and the reconstruction of identity. It is fair to say that Didion’s memoir helps to purge grief and place the loss of a loved one in a context of renewed hope.
This lacerating publication was a National Book Award winner and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is undeniable that American writer Joan Didion leaves a courageous and significant legacy.
The Year of Magical Thinking is a powerful testimony that impresses with its clarity, precision, and intensity. Anyone who has lost someone, or who has a family member or loved one with a limited prognosis for life would do well to read this work.
Image credit: David Shankbone
