Is there still magic in the world?
July 12th, 2006 Sarah - Alicia Ashman
Yes. And it exists in the writing of Joan Didion.
Only Didion could make a book detailing her life after her husband dies suddenly from a heart attack as beautiful, as quietly but perfectly structured, as The Year of Magical Thinking.
Didion, in her concise prose, offers as good a summary of the book’s story as can be given: “At approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.” (p. 7.) In addition to dealing with her husband’s death, Didion also had to contend with her daughter’s suffering through numerous serious and extended hospital stays during the same time period.
The book has been billed as a memoir exploring grief, and loss. What it really is, in the end, is a book which celebrates both the humbling and intangible nature of life, and love.
Entry Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Nonfiction
10 Comments Add your own
1. Molly | July 12th, 2006 at 7:38 am
I absolutely would have failed a stress test while I was reading this, I was that sucked into the world of injured hearts and brains.
2. Mary K | July 12th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Didion has been criticized for not showing enough emotion and trying to contectualize her grief. I did not feel that way at all, I thought she was very honest about her responses to what was a sudden and unexpected event. I was very caught up in her story and her writing. It seemed that she and John Dunne had an extraordinary relationship and had a strong writing partnership.
And as a sidenote, her daughter later also died, but I saw in an interview that she said the book was already done and she did not want to revist it.
3. Brdgt | July 12th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
I listened to the audiobook of this and it was excellently produced and narrated.
4. Sarah | July 12th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Oh, who on earth could accuse Joan Didion for not showing enough emotion? It’s all there, even if she is, as the paramedics referred to her, a “cool customer.” How terrible to assume that because someone is trying to understand and examine their grief that it is not “grieving enough.” I maintain this is one of the best, most passionate, love/family stories I’ve ever read.
5. Liz | July 12th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
I did LOVE the book… and that said I do believe that Joan’s way of dealing with her husband’s death, at least for the first 6-9 months, was to address it intellectually. I think a different woman from a different marriage would respond with more tears. It didn’t mean she wasn’t grieving or didn’t have emotions. To me it demonstrated that in grief she was similar to who she seemed to be while not in grief. She did research into what made her husband die. She avoided certain streets in California while visiting her ill daughter so she wouldn’t experience memories of the time that she and John and Quintana lived there. She returned to his writing and looked up passages on death. Their marriage was loving and appeared to me to be based in part on a shared intellectual vigor. Made sense to me that she’d respond as she did.
6. Sarah | July 13th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Thanks also to the person who suggested the audio book; I’m going to look into that. And, Liz, you said it so much better than I did. Thank you.
7. Kat | July 19th, 2006 at 7:30 am
We read this book for a course I took last spring in “new journalism.” I had to force myself to finish it. Thank God it is a relatively quick read. Sure, there were moments of inspired storytelling and details (”cool customer” detail — nice), but the book as a whole was terrible. The majority of my class was thoroughly unimpressed with this book. This may have something partly to do with our youth — but mostly I think it is Didion’s unstructured, all-over-the-place writing. I was definitely not sucked in to her emotions or story. I think she wrote it too soon after her husband’s death. The emotions were still too raw to describe on paper.
8. Sarah | July 19th, 2006 at 11:41 am
That’s interesting, what you say about your class and this book (as well as “the new journalism” as a genre/style). I wonder how much the subject and that raw emotion affected my liking of this book because honestly, before this, I hadn’t really even been able to finish a Joan Didion book, although most of them are considered classics. So is it the style? The subject? Combination? Was I just in the right mood for it? Reading’s a wild and wacky activity.
9. Liz | July 28th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Interesting point, Kat, about it perhaps being too soon. It was obvious as I read that there wasn’t much distance. I bet she’d have written a totally different book if she’d waited a year or two longer. In some ways it did read like a purge, or ‘all-over-the-place’ writing, as you say. Didn’t mean I didn’t like it though. I wonder what Joan herself will say about it in a few years.
10. Jane | July 29th, 2006 at 8:37 am
Just heard that Didion is re-working the book as a play to be performed on Broadway in the spring of 2007. Vanessa Redgrave is already on board to star. Here’s a NYT article about the collaboration
You might need to create a free account with NYT to read the article.
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