Culture Corner
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf, 2005)
Reviewed by Sarah Phelps Smith

To a certain extent, all art or even all good human work involves the process of making order out of chaos. The Year of Magical Thinking, a recent non-fiction best seller by one of the best-known essayists and novelists of the last forty years, Joan Didion, tells the story of her journey through the year of grieving that followed the sudden death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, on December 30th, 2003. Didion confronts the disorder of her life with a careful hand, lining up fragmented memories and rattled emotions, seeking some kind of order within them, in order to find digestible meaning.

Although the themes of death and grieving are universal, Didion tells the story of a particularly devastating year. The chain of events surrounding Dunne’s death is remarkable for three reasons.

First, Dunne died suddenly, instantly, with no warning (other than a history of heart-related problems which his wife had determined to be “all taken care of”—an element of her wishful thinking.) The book begins with the words, which become a leitmotif throughout:

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The second of the unusual conditions of this death is that not only were Joan Didion and John Dunne husband and wife, but they were collaborators in their work of writing. They both worked at home. They reviewed and critiqued each other’s work. When Didion was finally able to write after Dunne’s death she mentions that it was the first thing she had written in years that he was unable to edit for her.

The third and most amazing particular of her experience is that at the time of Dunne’s death, their only daughter lay in a coma in a nearby hospital. She had developed toxic shock around Christmas Day, and had to be induced into a coma in order to put her on life support. Her father died the evening of December 30th after the couple had just returned from their visit to the hospital. When the daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, does emerge from her coma some two weeks later, Didion must tell her of her father’s death—more than once, because she is not able to take it in. In the next few months Quintana returns to two different hospitals due to a pulmonary embolism and then a cerebral hematoma. Didion as a widow is not given the time and space to grieve properly because so much of her attention is taken up with the care and worry of her daughter. Grief for her husband and best friend is necessarily deferred—and yet has to be dealt with—while she is completely wrapped up in a situation that is the cause of more grief. She lives with the necessity to avoid any place, thought, or person that will remind her of her husband or her daughter, a feat that proves time and again to be impossible.

Quintana developed another health problem the month the book went to press. She went into the hospital with pancreatitis and died August 26, 2005 at 39. This final event is not mentioned in the book or its jacket; the author did not choose to revise the book after it went to press to include it. She is not writing for sympathy or publicity, but to understand the cataclysmic event in her own life, and to share it with others.

Didion moves through the months following her husband’s sudden death, experiencing various stages of denial, re-creating her own identity without her closest friend, lover and colleague, while living through an especially heroic stage as mother—moving from Manhattan for three months in California after her daughter’s brain surgery. She becomes a kind of emotional archeologist, searching for meaning in these overwhelming events. She sifts through everything her husband said in the recent past—measuring the significance, searching for meaning. She contemplates such artifacts as the grocery list left on the counter the day of her daughter’s brain surgery. She is unable to part with her husband’s shoes, as he might need them if he comes back. Towards the end of the book she acknowledges, “I realize that since the last morning of 2003, the morning after he died, I had been trying to reverse time, run the film backward.”

Along with Didion’s close and tender observation of reality and human nature, one of her gifts is to organize and maintain control of her literary voice. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s attempt to collect the pieces: the autopsy report, everything said by anyone related to her husband’s death, the events of their marriage as she looks back to see their life together as a completed story. At a time when she thought she “could not trust [herself] to present a coherent face to the world,” she occupied herself by organizing her collection of magazines. She says, “Stacking magazines seemed at that point the limit of what I could do by way of organizing my life.” But she starts somewhere, with a small reachable goal, rather than just putting her head under the covers.

John Gregory Dunne is pictured several times in the book as re-reading books he likes to “see how they work.” The structure in this book seems to be almost stream of consciousness, as we follow the complicated and anguished thoughts of her first months. Yet there are several motifs and themes that re-appear. These gauzy layers of narrative overlap without obscuring each other. The book is partly organized chronologically, as we follow the health crises of Quintana. Interweaving with the real happenings of the year are memories of the life Didion and Dunne shared for almost forty years. The memories break into the narrative as various random circumstances remind Didion of earlier days. At times the memories and their life together seem more real than the difficult circumstances of 2004. She wrestles with guilt, thinking that she should have thought of a way to save her husband’s life.

She seeks comfort and knowledge (“information is control”) in books on death and grieving by psychologists, but seems to find more comfort in literature. One recurring motif is from Gawain and the Green Knight, where Gawain somehow foresees his death. As Didion recalls comments from her husband in the weeks preceding his death she then quotes “I tell you that I shall not live two days, Gawain said.” “Full fathom five thy Father lies” from The Tempest comes to her mind, as she needs to tell her daughter of her father’s death. Of the non-fiction books she consults, the one that seems to offer her the most valuable advice is her old copy of Emily Post’s book of etiquette. The advice there is practical, to take broth to the bereaved. As part of Didion’s character is to behave according to certain rules of society, knowing the correct thing to do seems to be comforting—it is too bad that the advice is for those visiting the bereaved rather than for the grieving themselves.

There is a secondary subject in the book, one that is probably not even recognized by its author. While describing the experience of bereavement, weighted heavily with memories of her life with her husband, a portrait of a wonderful marriage appears and develops.

In her struggle to observe what was happening to her, and to organize her thoughts, Didion’s vision as a writer may have helped her to survive the year. By baring her soul in this most personal of books, Joan Didion has given the world a great gift. Her experience, particular as it is, could help any person who has to cope with the loss of a loved one through death—an experience that every human being must face at some point. Her “magical thinking”—the denial of the truth and desire for this thing “not to have happened”—gives way to her slow but determined effort to organize her thoughts, to allow the truth of her situation to become part of her life and to start seeing a future for herself under new circumstances. “I 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.”

Sarah Phelps Smith, Ph.D., is an art historian who lectures, writes, and leads tours to Italy.