Another Grief Observed

Review by Breanne Boland November 17, 2005 Issue

Part memoir, part meditation, The Year of Magical Thinking is a concise capsule of grief interrupted. It doesn’t try to make sense of a period of mourning, or try to make a definitive statement about loss. Actually, author Joan Didion acknowledges constantly that her grief is abnormal, although it is circumstance and not her reaction that makes it such.

In December 2003, Didion’s daughter Quintana became deeply ill and doctors induced a coma. Five days into the coma, John Gregory Dunne, Didion’s husband of nearly 40 years, died suddenly as they were sitting down to dinner after the day’s hospital visit. The book explores the following year, as she deals with the ups and downs of her daughter’s condition, and with the unexpected, unwelcome, disorganized, and devastating effects of her husband’s death.

Didion deals with the new and confusing with clear thought and research; hers is probably one of the best-read and explored accounts of grief on record. It’s detached enough to be universal, but personal enough to be deeply affecting as a story on its own. She tries to make sense of the way she changes and reacts by searching for answers and recognition in poetry and books of etiquette, medical references and ample personal recollection. Hers is an orderly, well-informed mind, and for her to be thrust into the vacuum of loss that comes with such grief causes her to reach for any authority, any solid truth she can find. Her search is thorough, and makes her own book a good resource on the subject. However, this book isn’t about a journey so much as it is about an experience and exploring it rather than dissecting it. She grasps for answers but at best finds commiseration.

Her grief also makes her stand at a distance to the events of that period. She copes, or at least records her coping, by inserting distance. She acts like the best reporter, recording the extraordinary and unsettling with a clinical air. This only makes her account clearer, rather than cold. She goes over and over what happens in her mind, the bizarre and near delusional (or “magical thinking” as she labels it when she’s being kind to herself), searching for sense.

Ultimately, she doesn’t find much, but Didion could hardly have feigned a conclusion. The most progress she makes is learning to coexist with this new state of mind, this perceived break in reality. The first words she wrote after those catastrophic few days included the sentence, “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” She repeats this idea throughout the book. One moment, things are fine, and the next they’re not only not fine, but they bear no resemblance to the way they used to be, and the rest of the world does not change enough to adequately explain the way your own existence has suddenly upended, with no prologue or epilogue. She expands the idea, backs it up, finds more evidence of it in the corners of her life and library, but the book never moves far from this main idea. However, neither does the experience itself, for anyone.

Didion’s tale will reach into your guts and twist in a most precise way if you’ve experienced a loss that comes anywhere near hers. If you haven’t, the careful exploration of sudden change and the mind’s inability to cope will still ring true, as will witnessing her attempts at trying to rationalize what can’t be grasped, trying to extract answers from the maddeningly routine events that led up to her family’s disaster. It’s reassuring and humbling to see that even a mind as sharp and thorough as Didion’s can’t properly wade through the murk of grief and mourning – and there is, as she explains, a difference.

The book is necessarily compact, a nonlinear but orderly wander through an experience that would break many people. It’s best read in a leisurely and private place, because chances are that there will be phrases, or chapters, or whole sections of the book that will make you gasp in recognition, and that will probably be the most subdued reaction this book will cause. It won’t give you any great solution to your own grief, should you have any, but there is comfort in commiseration, as Didion proves and provides amply. The only shame about this book is what she had to go through in order to put her story out into the world.

Knopf Publishing Group, 240 pages, available at booksellers and libraries.

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