Joan Didion- The Year of Magical Thinking

The title of Didion's book, an essay-length reflection on the year after her husband dies and her daughter becomes extremely ill, is highly ironic. Upon picking up the book, you might think that this is another book on the wonder of living your life like every day is your last, or a book on a widow finding new love and meaning in her life through the power of positive thinking. It's not. And that's why it's worth reading.

Didion's book could more aptly be titled The Year of Delusional Thinking. Didion's husband of forty years, the writer John Gregory Dunne, dies in front of her one night just after Christmas 2003 of a massive heart attack. Nevertheless, time after time in the year following his death, Didion finds herself thinking in ways that makes it clear that not only does she think that he might just come back, she thinks she can in some way execute his return. She refuses to give away his shoes because she thinks to herself that he won't have any to wear when he comes home. She searches through the autopsy report for the reason that he died, irrationally thinking that if it was something small, maybe it could be fixed.

Didion's ability to mourn her husband is hindered by the fact that her daughter, Quintana Roo, falls seriously ill before her father's death, is in a coma when he dies, and has to undergo major brain surgery and rehabilitation after his death. When Didion ends the book, a little over a year after her husband's death, she has just begun to be able to focus on grieving for her lifelong companion—hence the reason that for a full year after his death, Didion's thinking is, as she and Quintana call it, "mudgy." However, we read in Didion's bio after the last page is turned that Quintana herself has died in the course of Didion's writing the book and so Didion now must doubly grieve.

Unlike many accounts and fictional representations of grief, Didion's narrative isn't teleological. Grief for her is not a process with a definitive end, something to progress towards. Rather, it seems more like wading in circles through mud. It's a scary picture, and one that makes me hope that I never have to go through what she did. However, it seems more realistic than many other representations of mourning that I've read. The one thing that I would criticize is that Didion's account of the loss of her husband doesn't give much insight into the man she lost; aside from a few not particularly sympathetic mentions of what he was like during his life, Didion doesn't allow her readers to understand her husband and it is therefore difficult to understand the strength of her grief. Still, her account is fascinating and written in her typical, interesting style, and I enjoyed it as much as I found what Didion was going through difficult to read.