Entries in the Category "the year of magical thinking"
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
I listened to this (as an audiobook) after I finished Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, and the differences between the two books were immediately apparent. Most noticeably, this one was incredibly good.
Didion’s memoir is both smaller and broader in scale than Walls’. Didion writes only about a stretch of about eight months in her life: eight months during which her daughter battled serious, serious illness (coma, embolism, brain surgery, physical therapy to recover normal functions kind of serious illness) and eight months smack in the middle of which Joan’s husband of 40 years, writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack. It’s basically the story of how tragedy knocks a woman sideways; in this case, a woman who is remarkably intelligent, rational, and organized, and who is unused to functioning without those skills.
Didion’s meditations on grief and survival are powerful and raw, and it’s in this sense that this memoir digs so much deeper than Walls’. Walls gave the outline (the blueprint) of about forty years of existence, but she barely scratched the emotional surface. On the other end of the spectrum, Didion’s story allows the reader (listener, in my case) real intimacy—painful intimacy, because we have to deal with her grief along with her, so intensely does she render it.
It’s beautifully written, and in and around the death and destruction, it provided an interesting glimpse of the lives of professional writers. I really enjoyed the casual mentions of passing the time marking up galley proofs, adapting snippets of their lives into scenarios for novels, having dinner at the homes of movie stars (Didion and her husband were screenwriters in the late 70s, when serious writers could still be screenwriters) and New York City publishing magnates. I also loved how Didion sublimated her grief in research and then worked it into the memoir. “Sigmund Freud had this to say about grief…” and so on. Other readers—particularly those on the readers’ forums I frequent—felt a bit put off by what they felt was Didion’s academic detachment, but I loved it for what it was: a (futile) attempt to intellectualize an emotional trauma.
What really compounds the tragedy is the knowledge that soon after Didion finished her book, her chronically-ill daughter Quintana died as well.
Review in brief: highly recommended (though not for the faint of heart)
(Didion, husband and daughter in happier times)