Book Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: The Year of Magical Thinking


Author: Joan Didion

Author's NPR interview/preview of this book: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4956088

Date: 2005

Publisher: Knopf

ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X

Length: 227 pages

Quote: "You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

Joan Didion sat down to dinner with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, one evening in 2004 (while their daughter was in the hospital), and Dunne died. Far too young; he was only about 72. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's attempt to express, document, and illuminate her grief.

In some ways this book seems to be a posthumous apology to Caitlin Thomas. While much younger, Didion had dismissed her book about mourning for Dylan Thomas, without understanding. But books about grief can hardly do much to prepare anyone for the reality, any more than one bereavement can be said to prepare people for another.

I first read The Year of Magical Thinking at some time during the year my husband died; it says more about the experience of bereavement than about the quality of the book that I have no clear memory of whether I read it before or after the funeral.

That I felt more sympathy with C.S. Lewis's Grief Observed says more about philosophical resonance than about the quality of each author's writing. Lewis was a Christian, and several entries in A Grief Observed had to do with his reactions to platitudes about his wife's having gone to Heaven. Didion and Dunne belonged to a church, although The Year of Magical Thinking records a rebellious thought that "There is no eye on the sparrow" in two different places, but Didion chose to consider the psychiatric, rather than the philosophical or religious, character of mourning.

She describes her grief by habitual analogy with symptoms of psychotic conditions, and declares grief to be a kind of psychosis. Hence "magical thinking," and other clinical terms, scattered through the book. It might be more useful, given the obvious similarity between grief and some depressive psychotic disorders, to document the differences.

One of the obvious differences, as Didion wryly observes, is that to some extent people do "get over" grief (without "help"). Sensitive, serious people don't always like to think that we've completely recovered from some losses. There is life after bereavement, there is happiness and merriment and celebration of life, and for some of us there's even remarriage, but we want to pay some sort of tribute to the departed by affirming that we still miss them.

For widows there may be a certain melancholy interest in comparing notes on the grief process. Didion does this with Thomas's book, but she suffers persistently from her generation's belief that, in a tragic mortal world, happiness is somehow the only "normal, healthy" mood to be in.

She recalls, for instance, that she "never before had the patience to work crossword puzzles, but now imagined that the practice would encourage a return to constructive cognitive engagement," an idea probably suggested by her reading about therapy used in psychiatric hospitals. "The clue that first got my attention that morning was 6 Down, 'Sometimes you feel like...' I instantly saw the obvious answer...' a motherless child'...The correct answer for 6 Down was 'a nut.' Sometimes you feel like a nut? How far had I absented myself from the world of normal response? Notice: the answer most instantly accessed ('a motherless child') was a wail of self-pity."

I don't see the self-pity in Didion's answer to the crossword puzzle clue. I see it in her apparent need to identify her reaction as pathological. Grieving or not, I share her apparent lack of familiarity with what sounds as if it might have been some sort of advertising slogan; I, too, try to remember all the words of old songs and tune out, if I don't actually mute, TV commercials. The words that follow "Sometimes I feel like..." happen to be "a motherless child." The words that follow "I feel, I feel, I feel like..." happen to be "a morning star."

My mind would automatically complete either song lyric, independent of the mood I happen to be in on a given day. I don't own a TV set, once rented a room that came with a TV set for seven months before realizing that the set didn't work, and see my own failure to recognize a commercial slogan as a good thing. If Didion didn't seem so determined to pathologize her failure to recognize a commercial slogan, I would have thought it had something to do with the education, and self-education, that made her such a successful writer.

If anybody anticipates a need to prepare for a death in the immediate family, I would recommend neither The Year of Magical Thinking nor A Grief Observed, but Billy Graham's Facing Death. This is not because Graham is a better writer (most book lovers would say the opposite is true), nor because I can guess any reader's preference among schools of thought. It's because Graham wrote less to express grief (his wife lived several years after he and she had taken the steps recommended in the book) than to help people prepare for the practical work of dealing with death. There is no preparation for pain, but we can all prepare to take care of business.

A third audience for this book is of course Didion's fans, of whom there are many. If not among the most prolific, Didion was among the most respected authors of the twentieth century...partly because her books were, in the slang current when the best known ones appeared, "heavier" than women were then expected to be able to write about.

She gravitated toward serious, momentous topics. When, on page 81 of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion refers to "depression, a normal phase of any writer's life," she's not talking about clinical depression; she's talking about the kind produced by writing or thinking about the reality of war, the possibility of nuclear holocaust, the discouraging medical conditions with which both of the couple were diagnosed in early middle age, the Manson cult, the Watergate scandal, and other angst triggers about which Dunne and Didion wrote. According to the apparently fan-maintained Wikipedia entry for this author, "A sense of anxiety or dread permeates most of [Didion's] work."

How do you write about angst triggers if you have to struggle with a genuine depressive psychosis? You couldn't; really depressed people tend to lean heavily on "positive thinking"...and Didion's books aren't what the doctor ordered for them. If you are, like Didion, prone to sombreness, attracted to the money and prestige writers get by successfully tackling "heavy" topics, yet immune to depression-as-a-disease, you may enjoy reading The Year of Magical Thinking or other books by Joan Didion. If you are depressed, you probably need to spend less time reading anything and more time taking exercise in the fresh air.
 
Non-depressive readers can buy The Year of Magical Thinking from me here.