The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)

Genre: Memoir
Year Published: 2006

What is there to say about The Year of Magical Thinking that hasn't been said a thousand times in the past year? It won the National Book Award; it's a bestseller; it was on everybody's Best of 2006 list. Yes, it is an astonishing, captivating, illuminating book. Yes, it's brilliant. Yes, it's devastating. Yes, yes, yes.

So what can I say that hasn't been written about? Well, what's interesting for me as a relatively young reader is that I have yet to really experience death. I type this with trepidation, for fear some avenging angel will swoop down to punish my arrogance, but . . . no one I've loved has ever died. So Magical Thinking for me was less an affirmation of feeling I've had than a glimpse into another country that I'll undoubtedly be forced to visit against my will in the future.

Not a wholly unfamiliar country, mind you: grief, as it applies to lost opportunities, lost friends, lost experiences, is a shadow of the grief of losing a loved one. We've all probably experienced the former; and indeed, I did find echoes of my own, smaller griefs in Didion's large, all-encompassing grief over losing John (her husband), like this passage, which rang very true to me:

All year I have been keeping time by last year's calendar: what were we doing on this day last year, where did we have dinner, is it the day a year ago we flew to Honolulu after Quintana's wedding, is it the day a year ago we flew back from Paris, is it the day. I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. This day a year ago was December 31, 2003. John did not see this day a year ago. John was dead.

I was crossing Lexington Avenue when this occurred to me.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead . . . .

In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic.

The rest of the book is just as beautifully written. Of course it's beautifully written; it's Joan Didion. Compelling, too: I plowed through it in about twenty-four hours. At some point in the book I realized I was slowly coming to feel that I knew, at least a little, what this family (Didion and her husband John and their daughter) had truly been like, and that a scrap of her grief was dawning on me. I too wanted John not to be dead. I too wanted to hear what he would have said about a political piece she was writing. I too wanted him to be with Didion as she cared for their ill daughter.

We don't allow ourselves to think about the inevitable death of everyone we know and love, because it would make us crazy -- it would make us like Didion's narrative self in Magical Thinking. A book that not only permits us but forces us to think about those inevitabilities is at once necessary and terrifying.

Recommended? Yes, yes, yes.