Joan Didion & Magical Thinking

Library Mom will be happy to hear that Joan Didion was thinking of anthropology in titling her blockbuster memoir/reverie of death and recovery The Year of Magical Thinking. She found herself engaged in magical thinking, performing the same sorts of rites as peoples who believed that certain rituals would cause effects rationally unrelated, such as sacrificing a virgin to make the crops grow.

I don't know about you, but I have definitely done some magical thinking of my own. And I can point fingers at others who have as well, even if they wouldn't admit it. Two examples from my adolescence: the "belief" (?) that singing Tears for Fears' song "Shout" would somehow bolster the Mighty Ducks, and re-examining again and again dance competitions that didn't go well, thinking that somehow a reimagining could and would change the outcome. Or, more darkly, the fear of days that seemed too beautiful, as within three months days like this brought a dangerous brush fire that threatened our home and the murder of a family friend. (This last superstition I haven't quite let go of.)

This spurt of revelation is meant to serve as introduction to a book that I was a bit worried about reading. I've had some trouble lately with books and movies being overhyped to me. Turns out I had nothing to fear from Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking is masterful and deeply moving. It was open and honest, and yet self-protective. It felt profoundly true.

Didion lost her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, on December 30, 2003, in the midst of daughter Quintana's illness - a flu that morphs into pneumonia and eventually neurological damage. (And, after the period covered in the book, Quintana's own untimely death.) This double-whammy complicates mourning and grief, and by Didion's own account, it is not until the summer of 2004, at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, that she realizes she is Not Okay. And so, she begins to write.

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I develooped a sense that meaning itse3lf was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.

The power of the former sentence almost obscures the importance of the latter. For her whole life, Didion was able to use writing to remake the world, hide behind her prose. Suddenly, she "need[ed] whatever it is I think of believe to be penetrable, if only for myself."

And she was. Her evocation of thoughts and emotions was so powerful for me that I literally felt my mind racing as if it were my own, and felt myself on the verge of her same anxiety attacks. (That part seemed a little unfair. I could have used a little more distance.)

As Didion cares for Quintana, trying to boss her way into making her daughter better, only slowing accepting that there are limits to what she can do, she considers the inherent dilemma in the mother-child relationship. Seeing Quintana in the ICU after neurosurgery, she whispers, "I'm here. You're safe."

It occurred to me during those weeks that this had been, since the day we brought her home from St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, my basic promise to her. I would not leave. I would take care of her. She would be all right. It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. [...] Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.

And please let no one ever say to me that the mother-adopted child relationship can not be as strong and elemental a force as the biological one. This is a quibble I have with some fellow readers. Following her talk at the Festival of Books, I was in a circle in which I was the only one who had yet to read the book. Others claimed that her relationship with John seemed to be much richer and more important than the relationship with Quintana, that she felt his loss more. I argued, but from the gut, and unarmed with knowledge from the book. Now, having read the book, I think my gut was right. Both losses are unfathomable, in different ways. Dunne and Didion were intertwined through 40 years of life together, and a deep love. Didion and Quintana were mother and daughter, entwined in an entirely different way. Mourning each of them must (and should) be different. (Not to mention that Didion had not lost her daughter at the time of writing the book, demurred when invited to add a postscript about Quintana's death, and has been on a book tour perhaps as a way to blunt the process of grieving. That last is a little bit of unnecessary psychoanalysis, but I hold the main point.)

Having written for longer than I perhaps intended, I will just say that I have found few books so wholly satisfying. The Year of Magical Thinking is truly stunning.