“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

Didion sparked my interest after the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold was released in 2017. While her professional life as a writer has been successful, her personal life has been marred by loss, first her husband of forty years John Dunne, and then only a few years later their only daughter Quintana Roo Dunne. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores grief and mourning. The book opens on a snowy December night in New York as Joan and John are preparing dinner, after only having just returned from visiting Quintana in the hospital. As Joan is mixing salad, John suddenly gasps and collapses to the floor. The next hour is a fog of paramedics arriving, trying unsuccessfully to resuscitate John, and then Didion following in a second ambulance to the hospital, only for the attending physician to pronounce her husband dead. She found out that he had been dead for an hour, that the drive to the hospital was protocol for someone in his condition. 

The shock of being alone, of not having her partner of forty years to discuss the traumatic event weighs heavily on Joan. She must learn who she is and what to do without his input. Joan must remain strong for Quintana who is battling continued illness all while learning to navigate grief and initiate the process of mourning. Didion writes, “Until now I had only been able to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.” Didion spends the next year searching for signs she missed, reading medical journals for ways to have prevented his death. She habitually leans on information, assuming the tragedy is a result of not knowing enough. Didion searches for why, only to continually be reminded that some questions remain unanswered.

Having never experienced intense grief due to an unexpected death, I ignorantly kept waiting for the book to start, for her life to find a new direction. But Didion writes her story as she lived it that year, constantly looking backward. Each day brings a comparison to the same day a year prior, a time when John was alive. She realizes this is the only year when the one prior will include John’s presence. The anecdotes of their life together aren’t meant to develop a love story for readers, but to translate emotion into words on the page, a space Didion understands. The Year of Magical Thinking won The National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography. 

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep the dead alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point in which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table.”