The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?"

An important book, particularly for people of my generation, people for whom death is no longer a quasi-fictional event that only happens to other people. The Year of Magical Thinking (2006) is a non-fiction book in that it describes actual events that happened to actual people. It focuses on two main topics: the psychology of grief after death of one's closest person and the rituals of magical thinking in which people indulge after the death shatters and disintegrates their world.

For 39 years Ms. Didion had been married to John Dunne, the well-known poet. Indeed, he had had heart troubles earlier in his life and had undergone several procedures, but recently everything has been fine with his health. And suddenly, over dinner, he dies of a massive coronary. The phrase:

"How could this have happened when everything was normal."

becomes a sort of leitmotif of the entire book which describes Ms. Didion's thoughts and behaviors during the year that followed. The major trauma of the lifelong partner's death is compounded by a serious, continually life-threatening illness of her adopted daughter Quintana Roo, who has to be hospitalized during the author's mourning.

One of the main points the author is making is that we are unable to know what grief is until it hits us personally. When it does it becomes a catastrophe that we are completely unable to imagine and is in no way similar to the simplistic depictions shown on TV and in the movies. Grief overwhelms us and debilitates us; it is more powerful than anything we can summon against it:

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. [...] We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind."

Ironically, the copy of the book that I read had a stamp of "Self Help" genre: Ms. Didion clearly tells us that there is no help for grief, no 'healing' is possible, and that no one can ever learn how to mourn.

Probably the most fascinating passages in the book are those where the author recounts numerous episodes of magical thinking during her year of mourning. The term 'magical thinking' refers to people's belief that events may happen that are not subject to the usual, scientific rules of causation. For instance, we think that 'if only we did this and that, the unavoidable event would not have happened.' Ms. Didion hauntingly recounts the moments she thought she was guilty of her husband's death because she "had allowed other people to think he was dead." She writes the following about her thought half a year after her husband's death:

"'Bringing him back' had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. 'Seeing it clearly' did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need."

The reader will find so many more important topics in Ms. Didion's compelling work; for instance she writes about changing attitudes to death or the sickening tendency to use euphemisms instead of dealing with painful reality. However the most important message of the book is simply that death is final, and we humans are just not built for that.

Four stars.

View all my reviews