The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion's account of losing her husband and almost losing her daughter, all in the same year, is an intense and insightful journey through fear and grief. We are led by the widow who keeps thinking that something she could have done could have saved her husband--and further, who thinks that something she still could do might bring him back. That's the magical thinking.

I'm not terribly familiar with Didion's work, nor with that of her husband John Dunne, but the manner in which she deals with the events of this year really cut close. The obsessive research and learning about the conditions behind the tragedies, the focus on words and what they might or might not mean, what they might or might not bring about, the searching for reasons or answers or some sense of sense in it all, even some comfort, in meaning, is a tack that is both completely understandable and bound to fail. Or, if not fail, ultimately push her onto a different track of acceptance and coping.

It took me about a year to read this book. In the beginning I was interested but couldn't really identify, so the words were a bit more distant, less forceful, than they might be. By the end, just last night, new layers of meaning had crept out of my own life onto the pages of the book. My analytical view of her daughter Quintana lying unconscious in a hospital bed changed to a more immediate and emotional reaction. Life has a way of interfering with art, sometimes.

In the end, I appreciate this book a great deal. The difficulty she must have faced in writing it. The torture of reliving things and wanting to get them exactly right. The skill with which she laid out her thought processes, her grieving and coping, her inability to get back to life and the steps she took to try and get there, the resignation, in the end, to the idea that things were not going to change back.

The Year of Magical Thinking is, I would venture, as much a necessary book as a good one. But it is certainly both.