Book Review: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

I have to admit that though I loved this book, which concerns the sudden death of Didion’s husband, John Dunne, after nearly 40 years of marriage, I did not completely believe it. That is perhaps my central critique of Didion’s masterwork and of the Didion magical thinking theme. Her claims about her marriage, her claims about her spirituality, and the way she was actively controlling the reader’s view of her life, from the beginning to the end, seemed so much like writer-as-the-director of a Hollywood movie. This is an act of tremendous skill and art, no doubt. But it left me uneasy.

Didion would have you believe that her marriage was an idyll. And yet she keeps giving details — such as a much commented-on line in a Cosmopolitan essay about narrowly avoiding a divorce — that seemed to suggest there was much, much more underneath the tailored surface of her and Dunne’s life.

The Magical Thinking title comes from Didion’s strange behavior after the death. She realizes she is performing sympathetic magic. If she goes back to bed in the same bed as she shared with her husband, if she does not throw away his shoes, if she saves some object he gave her, she will wake up and he will be back. George Frazer, in the The Golden Bough, explains sympathetic magic this way: “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.” Therefore, Didion keeping his shoes, according to sympathetic magic, could bring him back.

Taking a step back: this is a memoir of family trauma, of a year in which Didion, aged 66, loses her husband, John, to a sudden heart attack, and her daughter, Quintana, aged 39, has a massive stroke and goes in and out of the hospital with mysterious illness. Didion tries to stay in denial, she becomes listless, she refuses to eat, she surrenders herself to the care of friends and rages at her doctor. She is called “a tough customer” by the emergency room staff who pronounce her husband dead, but she is not. She shatters like crystal under the reality of death.

Didion Delves into the World of Sympathetic Magic

At the same time, she actively grieves. She does not have fear of being alone; she has crippling emotional pain. Memories flood in. She calls these vortexes, painful memories which suck her up into the past. They lead her to wonder, too, if she had changed course at one of the remembered intersections of time and event—for example, if they had bought a house in Hawaii and stayed when they were holed up in a hotel working on a movie script—would he not have died?

She was a Californian who moved to New York City. To my mind, she should have not liked NYC, although seeing NYC as the absolute polar opposite to what Californians live and believe is perhaps my own prejudice. Yet when she asks, should we not have moved to New York? Maybe then he would not have died? I am riveted. “Of course you should not have moved to New York,” I think.

She Goes from House of Memories to House of Memories

Didion mourns not just her husband but every house she lived in with him. It’s impossible for me to not notice, as she remembers their life together, that John’s writing, described in the book, limns on the morbid, for example this plot, which she returns to more than once: A man is obsessed with his daughter, and terrified for her well being, and then she dies in a terrorist bomb blast, and the daughter’s head winds up on the desert cart — Geez. I don’t know how I’d feel about it if my husband wrote something like that about our child.

But for Didion, he is the One. Page after page, paragraph after paragraph: no reader can doubt that for her, he is It. Didion magical thinking again? If she just keeps saying he’s wonderful, it will be true?

And I as Reader am Unsure What “Deep Closeness” Looks Like

Their romance, as described, is no bodice ripper. The reader could come to wonder how much deep closeness there was between these two. Of course, that begs the question: how much deep closeness is there between any couple? What is deep closeness anyway? My mind flashes back to a scene from my own life, long long ago:

Old Boyfriend: “What do you mean you don’t want to ‘live alone?’ We’re all, ultimately, alone.”

Me: (Shocked, horrified silence)  

At least, it seems safe to say, John was loyal. And he loved her writing. That is a rare husband, and an excellent one for any writer to have.

But I’m still unconvinced as to how much deep closeness, romantic love, whatever, there was.

I Realize I am Delaying Finishing the Book

I’m not done with the book. I’ve got about 40 more pages. Why can I not conclude this piece? What makes the book so good? Why did it win, as declared in a gold seal on the cover of the paperback I got from the library, “A National Book Award.” Why am I tearing through this book in a weekend, while other books languish on my bedside table, half finished?

I think it is her choice of framing for the story that is so interesting. The tension that drives the book is: “will she come to peace about this death? Will she figure out why she’s so devastated and get herself pulled together?”

Writing a book such as this is, of course, on some level, pulling yourself together. Meanwhile, her lapses of logic, her (perhaps) hard to understand devotion, make her more and more heroic.

A Tale of Two Tragedies

I wonder, as I move through the book, whether Didion as she was writing realized she’s focused on the lesser tragedy (John’s death) and is in denial about the greater one (Quintana’s critically failing health). Widowhood, after all, is something we see so many woman go through, but not, to my mind, with this degree of … drama? My grandfather died, my father died, their widows went on, quietly, without seeming shocked or feeling singled out. But losing a child. Now *that* is awful.

What Didion has not told me yet: Why she loved her husband so much, why she cannot go on alone. I find this most intriguing. Will have to see if the last forty pages delivers the answer. Didion magical thinking again.

And Then I Read the Ending

Next day reading. Joan Didion was born in 1938, so she is roughly my parents’ age. In the last forty pages of the book, this is how she ties things up:

For one thing, she compares the sequence of events in John’s heart attack to the sequence of events in a tsunami. A tectonic plate shift under the sea in Sumatra results in a tidal wave killing thousands in Sri Lanka. She invokes the Episcopalian prayer, World without End, to evoke the constantly changing geography of the planet, where she asserts that there is no God, where “No one is watching the sparrow.”

It is strange, to me, to contemplate someone who insists on going to church but disavows belief in the Divine. I think, then, of my own creed: “In the beginning, was the Word.” The Living Word permeates my conception of this world. But for Didion magical thinking, there is no place for the divine.

I Struggle with Accepting Her Atheism, But I Don’t Have a Choice

Years ago Didion would have made me very uneasy, pushing with her superlative elegance of phrase these atheistic beliefs, but now? This is what she believes. She represents the thinking of the flower of my parents’ generation. For some, wonder at the miracle of creation is missing. Like an unbearable loss, I have been told again and again, this belief set is not a choice. But I’m not sure I believe that. Likewise, doesn’t she have a choice between “Thank God I had a beautiful marriage” and “No matter what I do, I can’t believe he’s gone.”

Perhaps, I find myself thinking, if the marriage were really superlative, she would not have to keep singing her grief? The lady does protest too much perhaps? Is she missing not what was, but what wasn’t?

“No One is Watching the Sparrow”

In the end, Didion remembers swimming into the sea caves with John, at their house near Pacific Palisades. You have to swim just as the tide rises or you can’t get in. And they swam just at that moment, with John telling her to trust the process, trust the world. It’s a beautiful, limpid image. But she follows up with “No one is watching the sparrow.”

This disavowal of the existence of God is Didion’s final assertion in the book. Perhaps she means to say, she cannot forgive the universe for the loss of her mate. I can understand that. Slightly earlier in the book’s ending chapters, she tells her doctor “I’m unable to see the upside in John’s death.”

And There is No Upside

“The upside?” he asks, as if she’s being ridiculous. There is no upside.

But then she writes the book, helps thousands of the grieving, wins the National Book Award … That’s all you get, in the worldly world. You want more than that out of life, you’ve got to apply to the Divine. For some people, a happy marriage and a book like this one would be plenty. And at the end, she didn’t answer my many questions.

But She’s Still a Great Writer

I got to the end of this “Book Review Year of Magical Thinking” and I still don’t know what exactly made John so wonderful. It seems in the end she did somehow find a way to go on alone, though she didn’t want to. Today, notwithstanding our philosophical disagreements, I find the entire enterprise of this narrative strangely, mysteriously, magically moving. All I can say to the author is: “Thanks for sharing your strange and beautiful journey.” And the Didion magical thinking too, of course.

Other Reviews of this Book:

Business Insider: “Why I gift the Year of Magical Thinking” by Mara Leighton. The writer says that this book is her favorite to gift, because everyone will experience the loss of a loved one at some point, even if they haven’t yet.

Goodreads: The Year of Magical Thinking. 3.93/5

Joincake: The Year of Magical Thinking Review. by Rev. Nancy Niero. Didion’s work is important because of it’s micro focus on the hour to hour experience of grief. And a grief of this type. “A sudden unexpected death of someone beloved is an entirely different journey of grief than someone who doesn’t die unexpectedly.”

The Lit Edit, by Lucy. At last someone else doesn’t quite get it: “I’m not sure what it was that I expected from reading it; perhaps some inspiration on how to live a magical year; perhaps a motivational manual that would kick start my thirty-second year in the best way possible.”

From The Yale News, 20 year old Annabel Moore thinks about mortality using Didion’s book as a springboard — and then decides she doesn’t really have to.