The Year of magical thinking
While Ms. Didion’s book, The Year of magical thinking, has kept me interested and curious reading her memoir of losing her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, there’s something about her style that leaves me tepid, as if I am on some serotonin reuptake inhibitor, where emotions are compressed into that rather dull, but stable middle range. No highs, no lows, a perfect 5. And perhaps that is her intent. For Didion talks elegantly about grief, but fails to show it. She hides her trauma from the doctors, friends, and relatives, putting on a face of quiet competence in public, but running amok inside. While trying to write a piece on one of the 2004 presidential conventions, she experiences some sort of panic attack and flees. And yet, I didn’t feel the same panic, though I wanted to. Her numerous references to jetting off to Hawaii, to Paris, to L.A., create yet another barrier. Her privelege separates her even further. Several times she mentions that her husband, sometimes when they were fighting, would say to her, "Do you always have to be right?" And she wonders how that could be, because she never feels like she's right, like she knows the answer. Those moments were the closest I came to feeling more than middling. She still had me held at arm’s length, away from the messiness, the memories, the joy, the grief, she was nonetheless letting me in to glimpse.
Her book made me recall how many years ago, I read Simone de Beauvoir’s A very easy death, and also Paul Monette’s Borrowed time, both of which are memoirs dealing with the death of a loved one. And both books devastated me. And I loved them for it.
Comments
Scott Silverman said on February 14, 2006 1:50 PM:[link to this]
Berry,
Thank you for the tips on the pieces by Beauvoir and Monette.
As for Didion, I had a similar reaction - this is a woman of extraordinary privilege often thoughtlessly complaining that Fortune has the audacity to ruin her life.
But I recently heard - maybe out of Didion's mouth, in an interview with Terri Gross; or maybe I read it years ago in a New York Times Book Review on a work about death and loss; somewhere, certainly! - that to grieve is to be temporarily under a condition of mental disorder. I suppose that disorder most closely resembles a disabling clinical depression. In any event, this is the condition that Didion describes, and the jetsetting self-entitlement passages aside, this descrption is brilliant and has the quality of holding up a mirror to those who have been through the experience of deep, unrelieved grief.
I do not think this is any sense a "therapeutic" read; anyone in mourning now should not turn here expecting solace. But for those who have moved on to a semblance of regular living, much of Magical Thinking will shock with the power of retrospective self-recognition.