A Writer's Journey Through Loss
Non-fiction Author Joan Didion Makes Sense of Life and Death
In this most personal of memoirs, Joan Didion illuminates the universal truths of life and in doing so makes us feel less alone
A few years ago Joan Didion, the writer whose illustrious career has inspired many other writers, suffered great personal loss, and, as the best writers do, she turned to words to try to make sense of what had happened. The Year of Magical Thinking (Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), is the result. It is a brilliant exploration of the year after her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne died, and during which their child, Quintana, continued to have serious health problems. It is also a lament for us all and for the price life ultimately demands of each person.
Life in Good Times and in Bad
The Year of Magical Thinking is a stunningly honest memoir, the story of a life lived in good times and in bad. The bad times became very bad indeed before Christmas of 2003, when Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s daughter became sick and developed septic shock. Just days after this, Dunne suffered a fatal coronary while he and Didion were having dinner. Although Quintana did get through her initial health crisis, she later became sick again, and had to have brain surgery. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion struggles to deal with the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness … about life itself.”
Everything Can Change Quickly
The book begins with a blunt reminder that: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.” Reading about how her life changed after the tragedies she suffered is difficult, but seeing how words, in the care of such a master, can illuminate our common human journey is uplifting. For writers, this book is a master class in just what is possible with this craft of putting words on paper.
At one point in her struggle to come to terms with what has happened, Didion writes about grief, and explains it perfectly. “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
Later, she goes on to put into words a realization that anyone who has lost someone knows to be true, that “… if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”
In today’s society, death is often softened, like a pill hidden in ice cream, to make it easier to take, but Didion’s observations are all the more precious for her not having done that. She has looked into the darkness and written about it with truth.
Required Reading
Joan Didion is the author of five novels, and seven other books of non-fiction. Her collected non-fiction pieces, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (Everyman’s Library, 2006), should be required reading for every non-fiction writer. Perhaps The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award, should be required reading for anyone who has suffered loss, because it shows how to endure, how to keep moving forward.
