Book Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking, an unsentimental memoir by Joan Didion, is not an easy read. Didion looks unflinchingly at her own suffering during a year that includes both her husband’s fatal heart attack and their only child’s hospitalization for life-threatening problems.

Didion describes how difficult it is for the human mind to confront the finality of death. After she leaves her husband’s body at the hospital, she says, “I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.” For most of the first year, she is unable to accept her husband’s absence:

It was deep into the summer…before I recognized that through the winter and spring there had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant.

In this irrational part of her mind, Didion believes she might be able to bring her husband back. She refuses to give away his shoes, because he might need them.

In Didion’s hands, her story becomes about more than one woman’s journey through grief. It is also about the fallibility of memory and the ways the mind can distort the world. Unlike another infamous memoirist whom I’ve vowed not to mention again on my blog but who can tell you exactly what he had for dinner every night he was in rehab, Didion is fascinated by the things she cannot remember. “I have no memory of telling anyone the details,” she writes of the days after her husband’s death, “but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them.” She remembers the paramedics being in her apartment for about fifteen minutes, but when she checks the building log, she realizes it was forty-five minutes—much longer than she had thought.

By the end of the book, as Didion begins her second year of widowhood, she had become more accepting of her loss. Still, she warns, “This will not be a story in which the death of the husband or wife becomes what amounts to the credit sequence for a new life.” She says, “I look for resolution and find none.”

Her book will not reassure those who want to believe that grief is manageable if only we move through the correct process, or those who must have only religious consolation when confronted with death. But this book shows the human need to understand ourselves and deal head-on with events we find distressing. In dissecting her own experiences, Didion writes about the transformation of her ideas “about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune about 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.”