The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
As I was reading the section “Acclaim for Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking” that prefaces the book, there was one quotation pulled from a review in the Chicago Sun-Times that stood out to me: “She has given the reader an eloquent starting point from which to navigate through the wilderness of grief.” I wondered, first, about the use of the phrase “starting point” here – particularly where does one start when grieving or mourning – and I wondered, second, about the choice of the word “wilderness” to describe one’s grief. I thought about how the metaphor of a wilderness resembles the psychological grief response Didion experienced throughout the year following John’s death that she called “The Vortex Effect.” I found this grief response and her description of it rather fascinating and I will return to it later in this discussion of the memoir.
The opening stanzaic lines contain a prominent throughline of the memoir, which is the line: You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends, a line that presents the entire substance of The Year of Magical Thinking in concentrated form. It is used as a refrain throughout and adds a certain weight to the text. She uses other lines too, recurringly, but none so often as this one. The refrain operates like the transposition of an echo in her mind onto the page; they are fragments that center the account of her memories and appear like distant music playing in the background of a film reel.
A feature of the work that will pleasantly surprise her admirers and one that these admirers may have been yearning for is an explanation of what makes her style distinctive in her own words:
“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself 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.” (7)
Upon a second reading of this paragraph, the parts of the explanation that most attracted my attention were the “increasingly impenetrable polish” she writes of and also her designation that this “impenetrable polish” she writes with had either grown or become more apparent to her as her career progressed – why had it grown? I thought further about what she was saying when it came to the rhythm of her writing - that there was meaning that resided in the rhythm itself – and about the way that she expertly juxtaposes the different components of her material so that their proximity yields meaning. It is her aptitude for this sort of linguistic collage that forges the impenetrable polish which cloaks her thoughts and beliefs that remain hidden behind it. An example of this in the work at hand:
“Everything’s looking good,” they kept saying. “She’s going to get better sooner once we do the trach. She’s already off the EEG, maybe you didn’t notice that.”
Maybe I didn’t notice that?
My only child?
My unconscious child?
Maybe I didn’t notice when I walked into the ICU that morning that her brain waves were gone? That the monitor above her bed was dark, dead? (124)
Although this work of Didion’s has more of her personal opinions injected into it than any other I have read, it still evades revealing the truths that lie behind the curtain of her impenetrable polish. The passage of The Year of Magical Thinking I include above gets mysteriously close to pulling back the curtain, but doesn’t quite do it, and is an example of Didion curating her linguistic collage. She includes a quote from someone she has spoken with, in this case the medical staff in the ICU, and responds to it indirectly with her internal stream of consciousness. While a careful reader can infer Didion’s irony, the irony of the rhetorical questions still veils her true and exacting thoughts and beliefs about the staff’s callous commentary. I can’t say I know, after reading much of her work and this memoir too, what purpose mastering this linguistic collage – and its increasing nature – serves. It could be a matter of just her getting better at hiding from her own thoughts and beliefs, the expanding ambiguity of her own expansive mind over time, or maybe both.
The memoir is understandably very literary, considering her and her husband’s life’s work in the field, but I was still interested in the sheer number of allusions in the memoir, as in, this is how a writer mourns. Didion makes the observation in the memoir: “Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.” (143) One would think that a writer’s mourning process might be easier in some way, as they have so much material to lean on, a reserve of previously crystalized emotional support to draw from. It’s not clear from this memoir whether this is true, as Didion’s oblique style evades such degrees of comparison. Some of the poets Didion references in her account are Gerard Manley Hopkins, E.E. Cummings, Matthew Arnold, and W.H. Auden. There are quite a few references, too, from each of Joan and John’s own works.
Her memoir is filled with dates and times that provide a finely detailed record of her memory of the events that took place immediately before and in the months after both John’s death and Quintana’s illness. This stylistic detail makes much of the reading experience of the memoir feel almost clinical, like she is trying to execute a self-diagnosis of her grief, not only directly with the aid of the medical literature that she turns to, but on her own terms. There is an interesting blend of subjectivity and objectivity at play in the memoir, as this coolly, devoid clinical style is blended with highly emotional reactions expressed allusively through lines and verses of poetry.
A recurrent feeling that Joan has during the nine-month period after John’s death is the urge to try and keep the dead alive. She writes, “Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.” (32) This sentiment of the reversibility or the lack of completeness of John’s death manifests in uncanny ways. She writes about making decisions around John’s hypothetical presence, one instance being taking John’s clothes to Goodwill:
“One day a few weeks later I gathered up more bags and took them to John’s office, where he had kept his clothes. I was not yet prepared to address the suits and shirts and jackets, but I thought I could handle what remained of the shoes, a start. / I stopped at the door to the room. / I could not give away the rest of his shoes. / I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.” (37)
We can see here that she doesn’t shirk the seemingly hysterical, borderline maniacal thoughts she has about John. Her account is candid.
Another feature of the memoir that illustrates Didion’s candid approach to the retelling of her grief experience is the honesty she demonstrates with how compulsive her thoughts are about Quintana and John. This is apparent in the way she describes her memory of some of John’s last words:
“He said these things in the taxi between Beth Israel North and our apartment either three hours before he died or twenty-seven hours before he died, I try to remember which and cannot.” (82)
and here as well
“These shards from 1955 were coming to me in such shredded ( or “spotty,” or even “mudgy”) form (what did I do in Cambridge, what possibly could I have done in Cambridge?) that I had trouble holding them, but I tried, because for so long as I was thinking about the summer of 1955 I would not be thinking about John or Quintana.” (179)
At the beginning of this essay, I cited the psychological grief response Didion experienced throughout the year following John’s death that she called “The Vortex Effect.” I drew a connection between this grief response and the description of grief as a “wilderness” in a review of the memoir by the Chicago Sun-Times. I counted the number of times that mention of the Vortex Effect appears in the memoir and came up with about five. A vortex is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary as “a whirling mass of water or air that sucks everything near it towards its center.” And so, according to this definition, a vortex is like a wilderness in its size and chaos, but divergent from it in the way that it handles its chaotic mass – a vortex is active whereas a wilderness is passive. This has something to do with Didion’s observation that grief is passive and mourning active. The sharpest insight Didion offers to readers in this grief account about the process of mourning is in her exposition of the vortex effect and how it operated in her memory in the months following John’s death.
I personally found the ending of the memoir tragic. She writes: “The craziness is receding, but no clarity is taking its place…I look for resolution and find none.” (225) The final line of the work is her professing her lack of faith: “No eye is on the sparrow.” (227) The course of her memoir does however offer readers some valuable wisdom on the importance of relinquishing the dead. Her memoir, beautifully written as her work always is, is not to be mistaken with a reckoning with the finality of death, as it is not this at all. The Year of Magical Thinking is a grief account of what it’s like to keep the dead alive in memory immediately following the death of a spouse. It’s a bleak book.