Didion's Magical Thinking

Many of us have experienced grief in some form, even if it's merely seeing it manifest itself in another person's life. I don't believe I've attempted to explain or dissect the emotion; it's so common that no one ever gives it more thought. For some reason, however, I seem to have unconsciously featured it in several of the stories I've written. In thesis workshop, someone pointed out stories that appeared to pursue the path of grief as it moved from character to character and then the paths of the characters themselves after they become afflicted with it.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, the recent winner of this year's National Book Award for Non-fiction, Joan Didion, the great lady of New Journalism, takes grief in her hands, feels it shape, then breaks it open and looks deep inside. New Journalism often involves the author featuring himself as a character in the report, never fearing to provide intimate telling details, never fearing to be honest when it's most painful. Didion is unflinching as she writes about losing her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. For forty years, they traveled, wrote, read, and walked together. They were partners in everything, intellectual equals. Five days before his death, they saw their only daughter, Quintana, slip into an induced coma because of pneumonia and septic shock. How much can a person bear in such circumstances? How does a person bear anything with grief crashing on all sides?

Since she was a child, Didion had been trained to, in time of trouble, "read, learn, work it up, go to the literature." Because "information is control." She pairs her experience with the research she carries out during the year after her husband's death. The result is piercing, insightful, and moving without ever being overly sentimental or precious. Neither is it didactic or patronizing. I've only read some 50 pages, but already numerous passages gripped me with a ferocity I did not expect. Many of these first pages would be highlighted in bright, inappropriately cheerful, yellow, that is, if I were one to highlight books.

The cover, I have to remark, has a clever thing going on -

JOAN
DIDION
THE YEAR OF
MAGICAL
THINKING

I can't quite capture it here, but you should take a look at it in the bookstore if you can. Four letters have been marked out in gold, and they spell "John." It seemed gimmicky at first, but then I found it strangely apt. A quiet dedication to Joan's husband. A note on covers: Both US and UK jackets seem to have the same barley white background, but the words are black and blue on the US cover, and red, blue and gold on the UK one. Since both are so similar, I wonder why they had to differ at all. Do British readers have a penchant for colorful letters? How bizarre these marketing decisions.

Today happens to be Ms. Didion's birthday. Here is a snippet about her from The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the essayist and novelist Joan Didion, born in Sacramento, California (1934). She grew up as a nervous, preoccupied child. She said, "I was one of those children who always thought the bridge would fall in if you walked across it... I thought about the atomic bomb a lot... after there was one."

She began keeping a notebook when she was five years old, and she later wrote, "Keepers of notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with a sense of loss." At one point in her childhood, she lived near a mental hospital, and she would wander around the hospital grounds with a notebook, writing down all the most interesting snippets of conversation.

Didion became associated with the so-called New Journalism, because she often made herself a character in whatever she was covering, and she went much further than most journalists in revealing her own states of mind. The title essay of her collection The White Album (1979) includes notes from a psychiatrist's evaluation after she suffered a nervous breakdown.

Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about her husband's recent death from a heart attack at the dinner table, came out this year.

Joan Didion said, "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. . . . Writers are always selling somebody out."

I'll write more about Didion, whom I read as a student in college and graduate school, when I've finished the book. It's too sad to make a Christmas present, but it's one I found to be perfect for myself.

Posted by Monoceros at December 5, 2005 9:08 PM