The Year of Magical Thinking

found online

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.”

These are the first lines from the novel I picked out to read for this winter break The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. The novel is a memoir of Didion on account of the year following her husbands death. It was published in 2005 and was immediately acclaimed to be a classic in the genre of mourning literature.

In the novel Didion writes about her experience of grief after her husband’s tragic and sudden death after a cardiac arrest. Some days before, her daughter was hospitalized with pneumonia which later developed into septic shock.

Throughout the novel Didion is re-living and re-analyzing everything that happened around her husbands death. By doing so we can slowly witness her recovery. Every time she talks about the tragic event we can feel her pain shifting, even just a little bit.

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

Didion begins her final chapter with this paragraph, concluding how different her grief was than what she had expected and what she had read in previous mourning literature.

She also explains the title of the memoirs when re-analyzing her thoughts in the first few days after her husbands death. She finds her thinking to have been similar to the way small children think, as if her thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome, as if her thought could make magic.

I chose this novel because I always considered grief as a really interesting matter. I think that is because it is something I don’t understand at all. I can maybe make out the smudginess of it, the basic lines. I think it’s an emotion beyond the ability to get over but rather live with it, a feeling that is beyond the possibility of description. But if there was a way to describe it, Didion’s work in The Year of Magical Thinking would be the closest to perfect.