// literary & arts //
Fall 2005
The Catharsis of Joan Didion
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The Year of Magical Thinking
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Seeing Joan Didion lonely, depressed, and broken in her writing is not something new. In pieces like "Goodbye to All That" and "In Bed," among other personal essays published in anthologies through the 1960s and ‘70s, she has never been one to shy away from confessing painful vulnerability in her writing. Though she has previously afforded her readership ample entry into her emotional tumult, she has never before done so in a work as haunting and searing as her most recent book, The Year of Magical Thinking. In this memoir, Didion displays her complete mastery of the personal non-fiction genre as she struggles to locate and understand the concept of grief and how it applies to her experience. In doing so, she dwells on the details of the most intimate and trying time of her life while retaining complete control and ownership of her story. Her narrative is purposeful in its dynamism, at once drawing readers in and maintaining a personal protective shield that no reader could possibly penetrate.
In December of 2003, two life-altering traumas assaulted Didion in a span of five days. On Christmas, her only daughter was taken to the hospital with a particularly virulent case of the flu, only to be diagnosed as "really very sick" with full-blown pneumonia and complete septic shock. One hundred and twenty hours later, after visiting their daughter in the ICU, Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a heart attack at the dinner table in the couple's living room. Dunne was pronounced dead later that night. The synchronization of these two events left Didion reeling, and she was plunged at once into the roles of both grieving widow and fearful mother. The Year of Magical Thinking chronicles Didion's year long struggle to absorb what became her new and shocking reality. She stuns readers with the depth of her emotions while reining them in with her punctuated yet rhythmic prose. This memoir recounts her collision with loss, grief, and mourning at their most consuming.
Didion's initial reaction to her husband's death was profound denial. During the year following Dunne's passing, she could never truly internalize what had actually happened that night in her living room. Though she made the requisite phone calls, arranged the funeral, even cremated her husband's body, she remained unable to admit that Dunne would never again walk through their apartment door. Her obsessive denial was so intense that she even, for example, refused to get rid of his clothes and his shoes lest he come home and have nothing to wear:
I had acknowledged that he was dead. I had done this in as public a way as I could conceive. Yet my thinking on this point remained suspiciously fluid…‘Bringing him back' had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. ‘Seeing it clearly' did not allow me to give away the clothes he would need.
Didion's desperate TEST evasion of reality is heartbreaking as she continues to think that her husband's return is conditional upon the upkeep of his closet. But readers will follow that she very slowly evolves, ever gently moving away from this line of thinking and toward true recognition of the finality of her loss.
Didion spends several passages contemplating the word "grief" in a way that is as moving as it is revelatory. She attempts to define the grieving phenomenon as it applies to her own experience, implying that if she could only master its definition, she could begin to recuperate. "Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life," she writes. The picture of daily life obliterated is at the crux of this memoir. For so long, Didion was incapable of getting back to living, as her very concept of what life meant had been forever changed. Through powerful imagery and brutal honesty, Didion depicts her paralysis under this totalizing sadness and forges a strong connection with all readers, whether they have suffered the loss of a loved one or not.
But Didion is equally sure to keep her story her own, sure to remind us that though we can know where she is coming from, we are still on the outside. She is the writer who erects and breaks down walls at will, choosing to reveal as well as to hide. Toward the end of The Year of Magical Thinking, she manages to further distill the notion of grief, contrasting hers with the general perception of the grieving process:
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it…In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be ‘healing.' A certain forward movement will prevail. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place…We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
In revealing the distinction between "grief as we imagine it and grief as it is," Didion empowers her readers with her discovery. At the same time, however, she qualifies this knowledge by saying we can't know it unless we've been there. In this way, she brings us into her moment of crisis as well as pushes us away from it, simultaneously revelatory yet withdrawn, keenly aware of her desire to connect with her readers yet keeping her own experience at the forefront of her prose in doing so. What emerges, therefore, from this memoir is the image of a woman who writes to communicate with others and to share her struggle but retains the intensity of her own saga without melting into the common "we," merely subsumed in the "grief" of the human condition.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion is stripped of all artifice, speaking to her readers in total honesty. These elements command both attention and empathy, unfolding on these pages through in the most shattering prose. The mantra that repeats throughout the book is, "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." After a year of dwelling inside this instant, Didion has emerged finally ready to face its aftershock. Through her own tragedy, she implores us to recognize the fragility of our own lives—that everything can change in an instant.
In December of 2003, two life-altering traumas assaulted Didion in a span of five days. On Christmas, her only daughter was taken to the hospital with a particularly virulent case of the flu, only to be diagnosed as "really very sick" with full-blown pneumonia and complete septic shock. One hundred and twenty hours later, after visiting their daughter in the ICU, Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a heart attack at the dinner table in the couple's living room. Dunne was pronounced dead later that night. The synchronization of these two events left Didion reeling, and she was plunged at once into the roles of both grieving widow and fearful mother. The Year of Magical Thinking chronicles Didion's year long struggle to absorb what became her new and shocking reality. She stuns readers with the depth of her emotions while reining them in with her punctuated yet rhythmic prose. This memoir recounts her collision with loss, grief, and mourning at their most consuming.
Didion's initial reaction to her husband's death was profound denial. During the year following Dunne's passing, she could never truly internalize what had actually happened that night in her living room. Though she made the requisite phone calls, arranged the funeral, even cremated her husband's body, she remained unable to admit that Dunne would never again walk through their apartment door. Her obsessive denial was so intense that she even, for example, refused to get rid of his clothes and his shoes lest he come home and have nothing to wear:
I had acknowledged that he was dead. I had done this in as public a way as I could conceive. Yet my thinking on this point remained suspiciously fluid…‘Bringing him back' had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. ‘Seeing it clearly' did not allow me to give away the clothes he would need.
Didion's desperate TEST evasion of reality is heartbreaking as she continues to think that her husband's return is conditional upon the upkeep of his closet. But readers will follow that she very slowly evolves, ever gently moving away from this line of thinking and toward true recognition of the finality of her loss.
Didion spends several passages contemplating the word "grief" in a way that is as moving as it is revelatory. She attempts to define the grieving phenomenon as it applies to her own experience, implying that if she could only master its definition, she could begin to recuperate. "Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life," she writes. The picture of daily life obliterated is at the crux of this memoir. For so long, Didion was incapable of getting back to living, as her very concept of what life meant had been forever changed. Through powerful imagery and brutal honesty, Didion depicts her paralysis under this totalizing sadness and forges a strong connection with all readers, whether they have suffered the loss of a loved one or not.
But Didion is equally sure to keep her story her own, sure to remind us that though we can know where she is coming from, we are still on the outside. She is the writer who erects and breaks down walls at will, choosing to reveal as well as to hide. Toward the end of The Year of Magical Thinking, she manages to further distill the notion of grief, contrasting hers with the general perception of the grieving process:
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it…In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be ‘healing.' A certain forward movement will prevail. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place…We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
In revealing the distinction between "grief as we imagine it and grief as it is," Didion empowers her readers with her discovery. At the same time, however, she qualifies this knowledge by saying we can't know it unless we've been there. In this way, she brings us into her moment of crisis as well as pushes us away from it, simultaneously revelatory yet withdrawn, keenly aware of her desire to connect with her readers yet keeping her own experience at the forefront of her prose in doing so. What emerges, therefore, from this memoir is the image of a woman who writes to communicate with others and to share her struggle but retains the intensity of her own saga without melting into the common "we," merely subsumed in the "grief" of the human condition.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion is stripped of all artifice, speaking to her readers in total honesty. These elements command both attention and empathy, unfolding on these pages through in the most shattering prose. The mantra that repeats throughout the book is, "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." After a year of dwelling inside this instant, Didion has emerged finally ready to face its aftershock. Through her own tragedy, she implores us to recognize the fragility of our own lives—that everything can change in an instant.
//Ellen Langer is a senior at Barnard majoring in English. Throughout her career as a student, she has had experience in newspaper, magazine, and book writing, editing and publishing. After graduating in May 2006, she hopes to pursue a career that somehow utilizes her writing skills.