After I finished reading Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking—a memoir of sorts chronicling the period following the sudden cardiac arrest and resulting death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne—I went back and reread the first chapter. With the final words of the book still hanging in my mind, I was struck by how little Didion gives you in the beginning, how she recreates the frantic and confusing scene of the initial trauma, isolating the central information in a vacuum by way of narrative control.
If you picked up the book without knowing anything about it, you wouldn’t know about the death of her husband until you were a few pages in. I can’t imagine many people coming to the book that way, but even still, without the essential facts, Didion is able to create incredible suspense in those three or four pages around the “ordinary instant.”
“It was just an ordinary beautiful September day,” people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.”
“And then—gone.” In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the gravesite. (4-5)
Vivid descriptions of exterior details pointing to an internal reality in crisis. And then, five pages in, she calmly lays out an outline, in the most emotionally present moment that you really get for the next two hundred pages.
Not that it’s not insightful, or not beautiful. But what you don’t get is impenetrable prose in the cool, journalistic style of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the style she made famous.
What you do get is Didion, in precise and exacting terms, giving you the coordinates of her position line by line.
I finished this book a few days ago. It took me almost seventeen months. I started last summer, quit for a year while finishing school, started again in Seattle, then stopped again, and then started again and finished without any issues. It has been a strange companion in a time of my life that has occasionally brought its own echoes of “magical thinking”—partial madness. Loss of control.
In the last six (maybe seven or eight) months, I have been away from myself, out of the office. In the midst of leaving school, moving away from home, I subverted my own emotional reality to cope with the tectonic changes in my day to day.
This is not to trivialize the trauma that Didion experienced with the death of her husband and hospitalization of her daughter. Rather, it illustrates the greatest accomplishment of this book: making the unfathomable experience of grief and bereavement relatable to the common experience of sudden change.
For example, Didion quotes a letter she received from a friend after the death of her mother:
“We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.” (27)
I was able to relate to this metaphor not because I have mourned the death of a parent (they’re both alive and well), but because it mirrors an experience I’ve had with my writing in a time of great creative change. Writing is the clearest indicator that I have of the invisible currents of my subconscious, currents that are expressed in the creative life. After graduating from the relative pastoral freedom of college to the new reality of working to make someone else happy, I knew I was hibernating in the comfort of memory, and my new work, which required some steering but lacked the weight to pull me to the surface, was functioning merely as a line from a buoy that checked occasionally on my pulse. Although without it I may have been totally adrift.
The fact that I’m able to write this at all indicates to me that the worst of that period has passed.
As a companion in the depths, this book challenged me to contemplate my own fragile nature. Didion investigates the clues that could have potentially alerted her to John’s condition–the casual remark, the medical history–and so I found myself wondering if the random aches and pains that surfaced from time to time in my body were pretenses for my imminent demise.
At times I even became frustrated with Didion, how she gets hung up on these clues, stuck in a loop around a pattern, unable to cut straight to the heart of the matter, as I had known her to be so good at.
I admit, my only previous contact with her work was Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Going to school in the shadow of the San Bernardino mountain range, the first essay of that collection, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” was required reading in my writing classes. There’s no getting around it, the essay fundamentally altered the way I thought about Southern California, beginning with the first paragraph:
This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.
I bought the collection and read it in a couple weeks, cramped in a hot apartment I shared with my girlfriend in Boulder, Colorado during the summer months of 2012, a time that was plagued by horrific violence and devastating wildfires. The book spoke to a part of my native Californian soul that was full of terror. And I think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. The calm, “steely” voice that you get in Bethlehem is mesmerizing in its absolute control. It’s totally impenetrable. Didion rarely allows you to wander, to deviate from the meditation of her narrative. It is her narrative.
And so is A Year of Magical Thinking. But in this book, Didion’s self-reflection invites us to question her, and she may, as a result, feel a little less steely. She is not “the cool customer.” Nor would we expect her to be. But it is mesmerizing nonetheless to witness Didion’s investigative mind set to work at solving the irrational problems of grief.
She remarks near the beginning of the book:
The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself. (7-8)
Caught in an emotional vortex—her word—Didion grabs at moments from the turbulent chronology of events, moments that illuminate exactly what she was thinking in mid-whiplash, and the effect is an almost surgical impression of the entire movement.
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