(Dunne, Didion tells us, was an admirer and student of Sophie’s Choice.) Both write memoirs that are spare to the point of anorexia, using the novelist’s method of letting salient details resonate-while withholding facts and observations that characterize ordinary acquaintance. Both have the additional aura of celebrity that stems from association with film. The writers also share something in the way of stature. This quality of typifying by example is part of what links Didion’s book to Styron’s. In this sense, grief like Didion’s is precisely what we have been taught to expect. The accompanying fear-that to act would complete the deed, so that discarding would be like killing-is what justifies Didion’s reference to Freud’s anthropological concept, magical thinking. She cannot throw out certain of Dunne’s shoes, in the half-belief that he will need them. ![]() One of Didion’s themes is the role of denial, the sense that the lost husband is with her after all, or waiting in the wings. And grief can encompass a peculiar, self-protective form of hopefulness. Didion regrets failures to act, more than sins of commission again, this response is typical. These phenomena are common in grief and uncommon in conditions like depression that tend to deplete affect. She is prone to tearfulness and to overpowering waves of emotion. Didion reports these experiences, along with some of grief’s differentiating traits. Loss may arouse the emptiness of depression, the superstition of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the agoraphobia of anxiety states, and the terror of post-traumatic stress disorder. One of the qualities that differentiates it from mental illness is the breadth of symptoms that grief draws upon. The phenomenon Didion depicts, grieving in widowhood, is well studied. And here, her experience jibes with what research has shown. ![]() On the other hand, the function of Didion’s book is precisely to tell us what we might expect. Few of us can say how we would fare with a child in intensive care and a spouse fresh in the grave. Any overwhelming experience can be known only from the inside. This statement is deeply true and simply false. She makes her central observation early on: “Grief when it comes, it is nothing we expect it to be.” Toward the end, she echoes: “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” In May of 2004, Didion began typing notes to herself: “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” By December, she had written an account of her responses to Dunne’s unexpected death. ![]() 20, 2003, while her daughter, Quintana Michael, lay comatose in a hospital bed, Didion watched her husband, John Gregory Dunne, die of a heart attack. Does the memoir speak for Didion’s generation? Or, since it is probably not the state of 70-year-olds that drives the book’s reception, for an era? Does Didion’s memoir do for grief what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression?īy now, most readers will be familiar with Didion’s circumstances. But the implicit claim to cultural significance is harder to assess. The Year of Magical Thinking is raw, brutal, compact, precise, immediate, literate, and, given the subject matter, astonishingly readable.
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