‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ by Joan Didion

Throughout the past five or so years I have both heard and read about a book called The Year of Magical Thinking a great many times, though without in any way discovering what the work truly entailed. Heartened by dizzyingly positive reviews by everyone from Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times to Garbage’s flame-haired front woman Shirley Manson, I set about finding myself a copy. Unable to find the text anywhere in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne and reluctant to simply order a copy via the internet (I sometimes feel that it detracts from the tactile whimsy of traditional book buying), I finally struck it lucky whilst browsing the biography section at the Akateeminen Kirjakauppa - or Academic Bookstore - in Helsinki, Finland. Delighted to have the lauded memoir in my hands at long last, I swiftly took it to the cashier along with a pocket Finnish-English dictionary and a Flammarion Press edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Anyway, enough about my aimless Euro-tripping…

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s blisteringly candid and heart-shatteringly real memoir, first published in 2005, is utterly peerless in that it is both highly personal and wholly universal. The focus is on the sudden death of Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, to whom she was married for forty years. Dunne suffered a massive coronary event in the living room of the couple’s New York City apartment on the evening of December 30th, 2003, at which time the couple’s daughter Quintana was unconscious in the ICU of a nearby hospital, battling pneumonia and septic shock. This essential memoir chronicles Didion’s thoughts and challenges throughout the year following the loss of her husband, a year made all the more challenging by her daughter’s horrific brain injury and subsequent neurosurgery in the spring. The way in which Didion details dealing with such mammoth curveballs is admirable, though at once you understand that the book’s aim is not to promote strength in the face of grief, or to extoll the virtues of ‘steeling oneself’ in the midst of death, but to explore the mourning process with unprecedented candour, and with a sense of humanity heretofore only touched upon.

While much of the key details in The Year of Magical Thinking are of course exclusive to the author - her husband’s abrupt death, her daughter’s gallant fight for life, the many memories of a marriage both unique and rewarding - many of Didion’s ideas are hugely universal, addressing questions that no human being who has ever lost a loved one would not have an interest in. She explores the universally relevant issue of grief with all the tenacity and research characteristic of an essayist, and yet her remarkable tales and portraits of the past are delivered to the reader with all the heart of a long-time prose writer, in a style that is clear and unadorned yet often reminiscent of some of the world’s best-loved poetry; in fact, Didion often calls upon the words of W. H. Auden and Gerard Manley Hopkins to further illustrate her observations regarding grief, loss and mourning.

For anybody who has ever lost someone close to them, be it a spouse, a child, or a parent, I cannot overstate the extent to which The Year of Magical Thinking qualifies as essential reading. A short review piece like this cannot begin to justify the inimitability of what sits between those two covers. I do not know how it feels to lose a husband, let alone one with whom you have shared forty-plus years of your life, but with this sharp, honest, beautiful book in my possession I feel that I will be better equipped to cope should that day ever come. This is the only book I have read thus far that I wish I had read earlier, perhaps during the months immediately following my mother’s death. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the venerable Joan Didion for writing such a thrillingly honest memoir, and also to the Akateeminen Kirjakauppa for bringing it to me. Better five years late than never.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in September 2011.