The Year of Magical Thinking

Since Joan Didion was an early favorite in the summer reading poll, I went ahead and picked up The Year of Magical Thinking last week when I was in need of new read. Everyone I know who has read this book had raved about it, and I'd had a very good (if less cathartic than expected) experience with the stage adaptation. I went in expecting a really good book, and Didion didn't disappoint.

As with the play, though, I did feel less emotional upheaval than I'd expected. Todd maintains that I'm some kind of heartless freak for not crying at a single point during the course of this read, but it remains true: I was dry-eyed throughout. But that does not mean, as Todd would have you believe, that I was unmoved. Didion's story is simultaneously a portrait of marriage, parenthood, and loss. That's a lot for any writer to fit into a few hundred pages and Didion does it seamlessly.

Scenes and small snippets of conversation between Didion and her husband John paint a portrait of an incredibly close, interdependent, and supportive marriage, but Didion resists the urge to see their relationship through rose colored glasses. Her struggle to do right by her daughter while she's sick is honest, understandable, and heartbreaking. Her cognizant awareness of what people think she should do and be during her mourning, her attempt to cope by reading what others have written about grief, and her wholly illogical responses to many things all ring incredibly true.

In full disclosure, I am somewhat annoyed by Didion at certain moments: there is a small proletariat part of me that resents her refusal to acknowledge how her wealth affected her situation. One could argue, of course, that it changed nothing. Her husband died, wealth or no wealth. Her daughter was ill, money or no money. But in some ways it truly did change things. When her daughter has a relapse in California, Didion was in a position to fly across the country at a moment's notice and set up in a suite at the Hotel Beverly Wilshire for over a month, neither of which caused her a moment's concern. This is a rare and lucky situation to be in. Most mothers, loving their daughters no less, would, at the very least, need to deal with stressful logistics that Didion was spared.

I don't know why, but a single sentence noting that she was relieved of this added anxiety would have gone a long way for me. And because she didn't do this, off hand comments about how she and her husband got Kincks tickets directly from the NBA Commissioner seemed to unnecessarily set her apart from the average joe.

That fairly minor complaint notwithstanding, the book is a wonderful one. Love and loss strike without regard to status or wealth, and so Didion's story is still universal on many levels. Anyone who has lost someone they loved will find aspects of their own story mirrored here articulately, thoughtfully, and, most importantly, lovingly.