Ever since “The Year of Magical Thinking” was published, Joan Didion’s best-selling memoir has been hitting the headlines.
It won the National Book Award and the 72-year-old writer has adapted her brilliant work for director David Hare’s Broadway production of “Magical Thinking” starring Vanessa Redgrave.
The book begins with three short lines yet so powerful they become a leitmotiv throughout this gripping personal journal.
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion wrote this soon after her husband of 40 years died of a massive heart attack while having dinner. They had just both returned from visiting their daughter, Quintana, at the hospital where she lied, comatose, on life support.
Didion wrote this memoir in merely 88 days and this speed is certainly one of the reasons behind its extraordinary success. The prose retains a “raw” quality echoing the author’s confusion and profound grief. But it is precisely this rawness, which gives “The Year of Magical Thinking” its heart wrenching and sincere tone. Didion has always asserted that the way she writes is who she is, or has become. She also said that the only way she gets things is by writing them down and famously declared “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
This story is the author’s 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 fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”
On the first night that followed her husband’s death, she realizes that she needed to be alone to bring him back and that marked the beginning of her “year of magical thinking” when she attempted “to reverse time, run the film backward.”
Joan Didion shares with the reader, intimate details of her life with John, her soul mate, like the absence of letters “not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart.” In the early pages of the book, we feel the remarkable harmony uniting the couple: “There was nothing, I did not discuss with John. Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voices… We were together twenty-four hours a day… I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”
The author deals at length with the debilitating feel of grief.
People who have suffered pain understand the author’s cathartic journey. Certain pertinent remarks about physical symptoms bring her ever so close to her readers. She mentions how cold she felt on the night her husband died “because nothing in my body was working as it should.”
Didion also brings up the interesting remarks of Geoffrey Gorer who describes in “Death, Grief, and Mourning” how people are rejecting the idea of mourning as a result of an increased pressure of a new “ethical duty to enjoy oneself.”
During that year of magical thinking while she was mourning her husband, she immersed herself in literature about grief. She learned that there are two different kinds of grief. One kind is associated with growth and development and is uncomplicated. The second kind is complicated; known as “pathological bereavement,” it occurs in a situation in which the survivor and the deceased have been unusually dependant on one another.
This memoir is a beautiful ode to marriage. The author, who has had a successful marriage, rightly says that “marriage is memory” and “paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.”
As Didion’s ends her account, she is finally coming to terms with the death of her life-long companion. She realizes that at first she refused to accept her husband’s death to keep him alive with her but “there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”
In a recent interview with the novelist Mark Matousek, Joan Didion admitted that you don’t get actually over things. “They become part of everything you are. This does not mean you walk around crying all the time. But you change. I’m far less patient about certain things. And I’ve learned to value love more. When I think of the moments that are wastes in all of our lives! They are particularly precious to you when you can’t replicate them.”
Joan Didion’s daughter died of pancreatitis after she had completed “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Quintana’s death from an inexplicable illness, forms a new section in the drama playing currently at the Booth Theater on Broadway. For Didion, this bereavement is “a whole different level of loss,” which she refuses to talk about.