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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The Year
of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion |
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Rating: |
**** |
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(Highly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Grief I started reading Joan Didion’s
account of the year following her husband’s death, The Year
of Magical Thinking, when it came out last October. I felt a powerful
sadness coming over me within a few dozen pages, and decided to set it aside.
I returned to it recently, and found that Didion’s description
of the power of grief to be so perfect and so raw that I understand why I needed
to give it a little time. Here’s an excerpt, all of
Chapter 3, pp. 34-41: The power of grief to
derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted. The act of grieving,
Freud told us in his 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia,” “involves grave
departures from the normal attitude to life.” Yet, he pointed out, grief
remains peculiar among derangements: “It never occurs to us to regard it as
a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment.” We rely
instead on “its being overcome after a certain lapse of time.” We view “any
interference with it as useless and even harmful.” Melanie Klein, in her
1940 “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” made a similar
assessment: “The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is
common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness. . . . To put my conclusion more precisely: I
should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory
manic-depressive state and overcomes it.” Notice the stress on
“overcoming” it. It was deep into the
summer, some months after the night when I needed to be alone so that he
could come back, before I recognized that through the winter and spring there
had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was
thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power
to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered
thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from
me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant. In retrospect
there had been signs, warning flags I should have noticed. There had been for
example the matter of the obituaries. I could not read them. This continued
from December 31, when the first obituaries appeared, until February 29, the
night of the 2004 Academy Awards, when I saw a photograph of John in the
Academy’s “In Memoriam” montage. When I saw the photograph I realized for
the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me. I had allowed other people
to think he was dead. I had allowed him to be
buried alive. Another such flag: there
had come a point (late February, early March, after Quintana had left the
hospital but before the funeral that had waited on her recovery) when it
had occurred to me that I was supposed to give John’s clothes away. Many
people had mentioned the necessity for giving the clothes away, usually in
the well-intentioned but (as it turns out) misguided form of offering to help
me do this. I had resisted. I had no idea why. I myself remembered, after my
father died, helping my mother separate his clothes into stacks for Goodwill
and “better” stacks for the charity thrift shop where my sister-in-law Gloria
volunteered. After my mother died Gloria and I and Quintana and Gloria and
Jim’s daughters had done the same with her clothes. It was part of what
people did after a death, part of the ritual, some kind of duty. I began. I cleared a shelf
on which John had stacked sweatshirts, T-shirts, the clothes he wore when we
walked in I stopped at the door to the room. I could not give away the rest of his shoes. I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would
need shoes if he was to return. The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated
the thought. I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away
the shoes) if the thought has lost its power. On reflection I see the autopsy itself as the first
example of this kind of thinking. Whatever else had been in my mind when I so
determinedly authorized an autopsy, there was also a level of derangement on
which I reasoned that an autopsy could show that what had gone wrong was
something simple. It could have been no more than a transitory blockage or
arrhythmia. It could have required only a minor adjustment—a change in medication,
say, or the resetting of a pacemaker. In this case, the reasoning went, they might still be able to fix it. I recall being struck by an interview, during the 2004
campaign, in which Teresa Heinz Kerry talked about the sudden death of her
first husband. After the plane crash that killed John Heinz, she said in the
interview, she had felt very strongly that she “needed” to leave Of course she “needed” to
go back to The autopsy did not in fact
take place the night John was declared dead. The autopsy did not take
place until eleven the next morning. I realize now that the autopsy could
have taken place only after the man I did not know at He was calling, he said
then, to ask if I would donate my husband’s organs. Many things went through my
mind at this instant. The first word that went through my mind was “no.”
Simultaneously I remembered Quintana mentioning at dinner one night that she
had identified herself as an organ donor when she renewed her driver’s
license. She had asked John if he had. He had said no. They had discussed
it. I had changed the subject. I had been unable to think
of either of them dead. The man on the telephone
was still talking. I was thinking: If she were to die today in the ICU at
Beth Israel North, would this come up? What would I do? What would I do now? I heard myself saying to
the man on the telephone that my husband’s and my daughter was unconscious. I
heard myself saying that I did not feel capable of making such a decision
before our daughter even knew he was dead. This seemed to me at the time a
reasonable response. Only after I hung up did it
occur to me that nothing about it was reasonable. This thought was
immediately (and usefully—notice the instant mobilization of cognitive white
cells) supplanted by another: there had been in this call something that did
not add up. There had been a contradiction in it. This man had been talking
about donating organs, but there was no way at this point to do a productive
organ harvest: John had not been on life support. He had not been on life
support when I saw him in the curtained cubicle in the emergency room. He had
not been on life support when the priest came. All organs would have shut
down. Then I remembered: the
Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office. John and I had been there together one
morning in 1985 or 1986. There had been someone from the eye bank tagging
bodies for cornea removal. Those bodies in the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s
office had not been on life support. This man from Why make this call and not
just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His
blue imperfect eyes. and
what i want to know is how
do you like your blueeyed boy Mister
Death I could not that morning
remember who wrote those lines. I thought it was E. E. Cummings but I could
not be sure. I did not have a volume of Cummings but found an anthology on a
poetry shelf in the bedroom, an old textbook of John’s, published in 1949,
when he would have been at Portsmouth Priory, the Benedictine boarding
school near Newport to which he was sent after his father died. (His father’s death: sudden, cardiac, in his
early fifties, I should have taken that warning.) If we happened to be
anywhere around What was the meaning and
what the experience? To what thought or
reflection did the experience lead us? How could he come back if
they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes? If you’re prepared for the power of a
chapter like this one, and for the questions at the end of the excerpt, you’ll
find reading The Year
of Magical Thinking to be a moving and powerful experience. This book is
a personal memoir, a tribute to Didion’s husband,
John Gregory Dunne, and a memoir of grief itself. The writing is outstanding.
Steve Hopkins,
May 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the June 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Year of Magical Thinking.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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