Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve been ambivalent about W.B. Yeats’s poem, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” for many years. In it, Yeats grapples with the death of the son of his long-time friend Lady Gregory by reviewing the many deaths that have shaken him over the years. He thinks of his grandfather, an uncle, and a mentor figure, and only after that, he turns to think of Robert Gregory, shot down as an aviator during World War I. As he concludes, “a thought of that late death took all my heart for speech.”

On the one hand, I’ve admired that line for its implicit power. Here is arguably the greatest poet of the century claiming that words fail him. In so quiet a way, he pays the deepest respect he can to the friend and son-like figure he’s lost: he’s said that even he cannot find language for the deep grief. On the other hand, it looks like an instance of Yeats blinking in the face of his own great pain. It is, in that view, a kind of cowardice. Owning up to it would mean wrestling with a pain that might make him question all he knows of his life; it might mean a naked self-examination he chose not to undertake. (There’s a lot to be said about Yeats’s fundamental cowardice, the sense of his living his life and career in a self-scripted fashion that ultimately underwrote his fascism, but that’s a story for another time.)

I think of Yeats as I think about this powerful memoir of Joan Didion because, in contrast, Didion is fearless as she contemplates the loss of her husband and the imminent loss of her only child. From its opening line, “Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant,” we see Didion acknowledging the most difficult truth possible: that she may not know enough even to be writing the words that she is. In fact, she acknowledges that she wrote those words and then had to come back to them later to realize the vulnerable place she’d set upon to begin with.

Overall, yes, this is a book about mourning, and it’s been good for me to read it in the lightening shadow of my own mother’s death this summer. But what I take away most from it is Didion’s absolute insistence on looking the unknown in the face and not blinking. She cries a lot. She allows herself to be distracted by quotidian memories of a life that, charming as it is, isn’t all that interesting for those of us who didn’t lead it. And she finds solace in quick references to classic and contemporary books that she sees as providing glimpses of the same grief she’s experiencing. But, throughout, she is grappling with the kind of deeply honest question that Yeats so articulately side-stepped: an idea I’d paraphrase as “What’s left of me when so much of my world is gone?”

If that weren’t enough, the first 30-40 pages of this are absolutely stunning. It’s hardly news that Didion is one of our best living essayists (although it may be worth noting, as I read this book almost 13 years after it came out, that she hasn’t written a great deal since this great public disrobing) but the quality of her prose is flat-out lyrical in that opening sweep. I must have read parts of this when it came out because much of it was very familiar. I hadn’t read it all, though, yet it remained familiar even as I kept going to passages that must have been new to me.

The metaphor that kept coming to me was jazz. It felt like I was reading a solo by someone like Dexter Gordon or John Coltrane, like I was hearing something the musician/author was creating in the instant. In the best jazz, you get the sense that the next note is arbitrary, as if it could be any number of possibilities, but that, once played, it could only have been that note. It’s as if the musician/author is unearthing something that hadn’t existed until it did, and that then had to be the way it was.

I’m not sure quite how long that lyrical section runs on, but that’s part of its power. It catches you up and wraps you in its language. It may as well be a poem, and I suspect even Yeats might have admired its technical power.

Then, not abruptly, we get interrupted by Didion’s reconsideration of the life she’s choppily trying to resume as well as by memories of the everyday life she and her husband lived. I’ll own up, as many other reviewers have acknowledged, that it gets a little slow in those parts. I’m sympathetic when she describes the child-made bookmark she finds in the last book her husband was reading or when she listens to his voice on the answering machine message, but I’m not particularly moved. There’s a quotidian quality to it, an almost boring sense that she’s making a public record that would ordinarily belong to her private self.

As I kept going, though, I began to sense that even such slowness was part of the jazz composition effect. The quotidian is counter-point to the lyrical. Didion knows she’s good in those early pages. She knows she’s found the voice that made her famous and that she’s using it to grapple with her new crisis. And yet, in a way I find beautiful beneath the ordinariness, she doubts that. Unlike Yeats, she lets herself ponder herself without “the coat” (as Yeats puts it in one early poem) of her great language. He boasts “there’s more enterprise in going naked,” but she’s the one who goes to that place of vulnerability that he can never let himself reach. She is, in other words, unafraid to step outside her Coltrane-like technique and confront her loss in language ordinary enough for most of the rest of us to have used.

Through all that, I haven’t touched what seems to me her central insight. In classical times, we understood grief as a necessary and public experience. We lost loved ones too often, and we lost them in sight of others rather than in quiet hospitals. As a result, we recognized the world-denying “illness” of grief as something that would change the way we interacted with the world.

In our contemporary time, we have worked to shelter ourselves from death. Our medicine is so powerful that we can deny it in ways unthinkable even a century ago. The classical thinkers would have thought us children for the hope we place in recovery from infection or physical defect; they could not have believed the tenacity with which we still imagine even our weakest will hold onto life.

As a result, we tend to be more startled by death and therefore less prepared for it. Our grief has a different power because we have not allowed ourselves to anticipate it in the same ways. We have, that is, allowed our technology and the busy-ness (yes, the quotidian) of our culture to keep from us the truth we all begin to suspect even in childhood: that everything and everyone we know will pass.

So, Didion’s book here questions much of the foundation of our contemporary experience. This is a memoir about the loss of her husband – and about the dawning acknowledgement that she is losing her daughter – but it’s even more powerfully about her recognition that there is more yet to lose. That’s as brave a recognition as I can imagine, and she faces it with a courage that makes it seem possible for me to take one more small step away from my own grief at losing my mother.

It's hard to ask much more of any book.


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