The Year of Magical Thinking
I just finished reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and of course it’s all the things the everyone says: direct, heartbreaking, wise, necessary. One review included at the end of the edition I read says that it is vital reading “for any one who has lost some one or who will someday lose someone,” which I suppose is everybody. And fair enough. Her highly personal, introspective account of her own experience of grief, does feel somehow universal. There is a sense that she is testifying to the way we are paradoxically somehow united, or at least have some commonality, in the isolation we each experience in grief, in loss. Her experience of the loss of her husband and daughter is not the experience that anyone else will have, in our own grief. At least not in the ways that grief will tell us matter. But how she confronts her grief, in fact her refusal to universalize it, might point a way for the rest of us.
Another quote included at the back of the book, in this case in an advertisement for her other writing, refers to her trademark “irony,” and another to her “poise.” I find the latter either inane or offensive - take your pick. Having also read Slouching Towards Bethlehem in recent months, it seems to me that what so many people (at least in the clippings in the adverts in the backs of books, and in interviews) refer to her “precision” is part and parcel with this quality of reserved irony, or absurdity, or even paradox that is what’s so important in her writing. There is a deep-rooted sense, as she says herself in the preface to Bethlehem, that she wants to “[deal] directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart” and “to come to terms with disorder,” that there are dualities and irresolvable instabilities at the heart of things. Her style has “poise” because irresolvabilities are hard to capture and name clearly, clearly enough not only to not become entrapped by them (clichés, overextend analogies, ideology), but to succeed in communicating them to someone else. To give another person the gift of clarity about some tiny squirming facet of the reality we confront is almost impossible. Calling that discipline “poise” is patting a mystic on the head. Calling it “irony” underestimates the mission, but at least acknowledges there might be one. This isn’t a clinical book; it’s a beautiful one.
The Year of Magical Thinking is also a beautiful book because it adds goes further than just coming to terms: it is defiant. Didion is far too wise a writer and philosopher to let this book be any one thing. But one thing it is, is the turning of that resolute gaze that she directs at disorder back on herself as she struggles through the irresolvability of grief. She writes throughout in a way that can be easily misread as punishing herself for self pity, or maybe as ironically distancing herself from self pity by naming it so publicly. But she isn’t just lashing herself with irony. She isn’t just holding her pain out at arm’s length to maintain her poise in front of the house guests. The Year of Magical Thinking is her refusal to choose between anatomizing the full extent of her pain - up to and including whether she will ever really be herself again - and subordination to it. She catalogs the evidence of her cognitive decline precisely. She writes that she may never write again. This double movement of objectivity and subjectivity lets her exfiltrate hope from devastation. She gives us a book that sees no hope for the future beyond grief and yet itself is evidence to the contrary. There’s a strange objectivity in this existentialism that says, loudly, what so much of her writing at least whispers: the world can’t go on, it will go on.