Review of “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

When Joan Didion died recently, I had to think back on whether I’d read any of her books. I’m pretty sure I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but the fact that I’m uncertain tells you it didn’t make much of an impression. I read Tom Wolf’s Electric Koolaid Acid Test in college; it covers the same time period, but I recall much more of his book.

I decided to give Didion another chance, after reading the fulsome praise heaped on her after her passing. I settled on The Year of Magical Thinking because the idea of the book resonated. You can read perfectly good reviews online, so I won’t give a detailed plot synopsis. Suffice to say that it is her account of the death of her husband after nearly 40 years of marriage and her struggles to come to grips with the loss.

Didion and her husband were together most days of their marriage and Didion was emotionally dependent on her husband as a sounding board for decisions large and small. The picture she paints of herself looks to me like someone who is used to control and at sea when she can’t control the details of her life. His sudden death is treated as a rebuke to her sense of control, and she struggles to find evidence that there was something she could have done to prevent his death and to somehow bring him back.

The book has a lot of white space, and several of the paragraphs feature a repeating phrase that begins each sentence, like an incantation. This made me read slower and gave me a chance to pause and reflect on Didion’s emotional state. At first, I found the excruciating specificity—the names of elite stores where she purchased clothing, the elite hotels she stayed in, the elite restaurants she dined in, the elite travel destinations—annoying. Why not say “when my daughter came home from college” instead of “came home from Barnard.” But I came to see all this not as bragging but as a manifestation of her need to control; she built her life around the most expensive and elite experiences because they guaranteed predictability and the certainty of satisfaction and validation. This book is about someone who discovers that some valuable things are beyond her control and how she fights this discovery with magical thinking and retreat into an immutable past to avoid the uncertain and uncomfortable future.

Linda and I have been married nearly 45 years, and both of us have maintained professional careers in related fields continuously during that time. After that, the similarities end. But I know that one of us will die first, leaving the other to deal with the emotional aftermath. I know this, but that knowledge doesn’t really make me prepared if I’m the survivor. Didion is careful to acknowledge what she knows is real while acknowledging that her behavior and magical thinking betrays that knowledge.

I don’t think I would have been much moved by this book if I’d read it at the age of 20 or 40. But I’ve been fortunate that nobody I was close to died since a childhood friend was killed in a bike accident when I was in elementary school. My parents died in the past few years, yes, but they were in their 80s and their health had been declining for years. Didion’s husband had been having cardiovascular problems, including artery blockage and arrhythmias that eventually necessitated a pacemaker. Although his sudden heart attack in their dining rooms was naturally a shock, looking back she recognizes the warning signs. In a way, this only magnifies her grief and self-pity, but this is a book about coping with sudden loss, and her reactions are natural and human. I’m glad I read this book, and if the time comes where I’m the one left behind, I should probably read it again.