The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s book of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) is one of the literary landmarks of the 1960s, and one of the best works of non-fiction in the last half of the 20^th century. She was and remains a highly idiosyncratic writer. She was one of the first writers to make writing about her own self as a way of writing about the society of which she has been more a highly perceptive observer than an emblem. While many of her contemporaries and successors, people she has influenced, have never moved beyond a conceited feathering of personal ego, she has always gone much further.

Didion’s partner in writing and in marriage was John Gregory Dunne, a novelist and screenwriter. They were married for nearly forty years and were rarely apart from one another. They both wrote at home, and they collaborated on screenplays. Dunne died on the evening of December 30, 2003, as Didion was mixing him a drink. They had just been to visit their daughter Quintana, who was critically ill with complications from pneumonia. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s documentary narrative of the year following his death. Few writers have offered such candid glimpses into their own sorrow and grief.

Didion is a highly self-conscious writer. In a sense, her own consciousness, her consciousness of self, her self-conscious observations of her world, is her major subject. She has lived an affluent, privileged life which she neither apologizes for nor brags about. She openly shares the names of famous people, some of them celebrities, who have been her friends. In this sense she reminds one of Woody Allen, whose life in the same rarified social strata he exposes frequently in his films. But there is in Woody Allen (an artist whom Didion attacked in a notorious New York Review of Books essay) more than a little of the the show-off as he drops names of famous celebrities and artists. In Didion’s work, such figures are simply people she knows, part of her life.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a powerful and affecting book. I can think of no other book like it. It has its moments of excessive melodrama, of preciousness, but for the most part it is utterly candid and honest. Didion is able to view herself with a frightening objectivity, yet she is in a sense a wholly subjective writer.

This is also a genuine literary memoir in which Didion interweaves a line from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, lines from Delmore Schwartz, and passages from her husband’s novels and from her own writings. These references contribute to her exploration of her own period of grief.

This is a painful book to read. I recommend it highly.