“The Year of Magical Thinking”
Review by Carol Jacobson—the Book Ladies
Special to the Morning News

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” So begins Joan Didion’s new book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” in which she chronicles the year following her husband’s sudden death.

On December 30, 2004, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had just returned from the hospital where their only daughter, Quintana Roo was in a coma following complications from the flu. They sat down to dinner; Dunne asked a question about the kind of scotch in his drink and fell over dead from a massive heart attack.

During the following year, Didion spent several months living near UCLA so she could care for her still desperately ill daughter. And while that was a distraction, she mostly grieved for Dunne with all the disorientation and crazy, magical thinking that accompanies sudden death and life-altering grief. For example, some months after his death, Didion was cleaning out a closet and found herself unable to get rid of his shoes thinking he might need them if he came back.

She described the way she thought and behaved until, as she points out, a year and a day had passed. In the final pages of this memoir, she predicts that she will no longer measure the time since he died by what she was doing “a year ago” with her husband and recognizes that her “sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even ‘mudgy,’ softened, transmuted.”

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne were literary figures during the tumultuous 60s, 70s and even into the 80s in the U.S. Didion’s early works include “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” (1968) a collection of essays that explored American culture, particularly the hippy life in Haight-Ashbury and which exposed the dark underbelly of free love. In 1979, she published “The White Album,” focusing again on California in the 60s. Her peers among what were then called the “New Journalists” included Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe.

John Dunne was primarily a screenwriter of considerable stature and wrote the screenplay for “Panic in Needle Park” and “True Confessions” starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall.

She describes her nearly unbearable grief through flashbacks to earlier times with Dunne and through the literature and writers that had always surrounded her. She remembers, in fragments where they had lived, the places they had visited, the fog on a certain night in Los Angles, a party on a rooftop, a conversation.

The Dunnes had been married almost 40 years when John died, and as Didion points out, except for a few weeks when they were first married, they had spent their entire married life together, working in the same house. So she was not surprised when she discovered that her particular form of grief could be labeled “pathological bereavement” which occurs when the survivor and deceased had been unusually dependent on one another. Does that mean married, husband/wife, family, she asks.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” clearly describes Didion’s confusion, grief, and derangement with raw honesty. According to the Washington Post, “It was not written as a self-help handbook for the bereaved but as a journey into a place that none of us can fully imagine until we have been there.”

I read the book in one of my more schizophrenic ways: I read the first chapter, then the last five pages, back to the second chapter, then the last five pages again, looking, I presume, for an answer or a miracle. I didn’t use a bookmark; I didn’t particularly care where I started when I returned to the story. If I began reading a bit further into the book, that was okay, I’d figure it out and go back to where I’d left off. I didn’t mind re-reading sections. Like Didion, I was looking for an answer to my own question: how did she survive such acute and overwhelming grief?

Didion used remarkable literary devices to tell this story. She returned again and again through the book, to the night Dunne died, turning over the events, the words he spoke, the way the medical team and the hospital responded to her and to him, examining it from a dozen different angles, trying to understand what had happened, and as she points out, trying to bring him back.

She also used labyrinthine sentences woven together with fragments of memory that surely must mirror the way we think under stress.

She started the book in the fall of 2004, with the hoped for goal of completing it by the first anniversary of her husband’s death. It actually took 88 days.

In a cruel turn of irony, her daughter, Quintana Roo, died shortly after the book was completed but before publication. “It’s finished,” said Didion of the book, and she did not change it to reflect this second tragedy.

In the end, I am grateful to Didion for sharing her experience with me and wish her well; she is a strong lady.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion. Alfred A Knopf. New York. 2005.

Carol Jacobson can be reached at 824-5343.