I Don't Hate Joan Didion Anymore

Book Read: The Year of Magical Thinking

Author:Joan Didion

I really like Joan Didion's writing. Technically, she is nearly flawless. Her sentences are characterized by her careful word choices and restraint, and yet her profiles of people and situations are close. They seem true. Like most people I prefer her journalism from the '60s, especially the stuff collected in The White Album. Dark tales drenched in California sunshine. Murdering housewives, Charles Manson, the shifting faces and allegiances of the Beatles. Didion has a way of making everything seem iconic. There's also a backside to this. Emma Brockes hit it dead on in this Guardian interview:

While many of her journalistic peers got carried away in the 60s, Didion wrote with a cool head in accordance with the principle that the lower the temperature of her prose, the higher the emotional voltage it could carry. Her self-possession is such that the mere act of breathing in her presence feels like a vulgar transgression.

Although I loved the writing, the fragility of its author didn't sit well with me. And it confirmed my suspicions that this clean, laboured, clipped prose came from a detached, stingy, frail hypochondriac. Knowing this made the writing more interesting. It did not make me warm up to Joan Didion herself.

Flash forward to The Year of Magical Thinking. In 2004, Didion is sitting with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in their New York apartment, eating dinner, making idle conversation--the things that couples do. Suddenly he keels over, having suffered a heart attack. He dies that evening. Meanwhile, Didion's 39-year-old daughter Quintana is in hospital suffering severe complications related to pneumonia. Magical Thinking deals with Didion's life after Dunne's death, and to a certain extent, her memories of him and Quintana both. (Quintana died a few months after the book was written, and Didion opted not to revise it to include this information.)

Yeah, it's a heavy book. But not as heavy as it could be. As most of you know (or can probably guess) Didion applies her finely-honed journalistic detachment to these traumatic life events. In a sentence, it's simply a thoughtful, well-researched account of a personal crisis. Early on after Dunne died, Didion lapsed into what she calls a sort of "dementia." She refuses to throw away Dunne's shoes (despite having donated the rest of his clothes to charity) because she wholeheartedly believes he "might need them later." She is aware that rationality, at this moment, is not there, and continues to maintain her cool exterior. Her form of grief is, in her words, entirely American. This detachment helps her come off as a "cool customer" to doctors, nurses, and worried friends. It helps her scrape by.

At the same time, Didion researches the ins and outs of virtually every aspect of both Dunne's heart condition and Quintana's various operations and complications. She feels knowledge is power. She needs to know everything to feel in control. This is where the book hits its emotional mark. Although Didion's writing is entirely sober and almost numb in its impassiveness, I sucked in a breath at the point where she recalls asking Quintana's doctor delicate and nauseating questions about whether her brain has shifted, or swollen, or have both her pupils fixed yet, or just one?

Didion's ruminations on her grieving process show up in the novel's last few chapters. It was the first time I had encountered her "real voice" and I welcomed it. It is good to learn that an author you previously felt was unapproachable--and indeed, completely unreachable as a relateable person--indeed understood grief, and guilt and her own state of unravelling. It's bleak, but not despairing; sad but not saccharine. We know Didion well enough at this point to know she will get through. It is the process that compels us to turn the page, and I suspect comforts as well.

There are many terrible books about grief, mourning and death out there---self-help manuals and Christian or new-age edicts disguised as meaningful literature. Magical Thinking is only the second book I've encountered that has presented the process in any kind of graceful and honest way. (The first is Banana Yoshimoto's beautiful Kitchen .) The book has an immensely calming effect, and you don't have to be mourning a recent loss to take something from it.