The Year of Magical Thinking

i mean i’m fine i’ll just cry myself to sleep for the next few days

Hated it, hated it, hated it- but kept reading with the hope that all my pain and suffering would somehow be worth it in the end. It wasn't. The same self-pitying, whiney, depressing, self-important sentiments are basically repeated over and over again only with different words. Joan Didion can obviously write well, but she should have left this cathartic piece in her closet. And I'm not averse to reading novels that deal with grief. This one was just way too self-indulgent and redundant for me. And Didion's pervasive name-dropping and repeated descriptions of her wealth and fame just made me hate the book even more.

Oh, a mente, a mente tem montanhas;
penhascos a pique
Assustadores, alcantilados, que ninguém aprofunda.
Desvaloriza-os quem nunca lá esteve suspenso.
Acordo e sinto o velo da escuridão, não do dia.
E pedi eu para estar onde não chegassem tempestades!
— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gostei deste poema...

Como Joan Didion escreveu este livro a seguir à morte do marido, pensei tratar-se de algo no género de A ridícula ideia de não voltar a ver-te, de Rosa Montero, ou de Os níveis da vida, de Julian Barnes. Mas de sentimento não vi nada; apenas textos retirados de livros sobre luto e excertos de obras anteriores de Didion; descrições de viagens e refeições; e muitos muitos relatos de doenças, exames médicos e procedimentos hospitalares. Insuportável!

You might think of me as a cynic.

If you’re being kind, that is. I’m the one that says ’Seriously?’ when being told of some tragic event--like someone would actually make up the horrific thing. I’m the one that views the whole process of death--the telling, the grieving, the service of any kind, the ’after’-- as playing out like I’m in a soap opera bubble. Which camera should I look into when I break down again? Strike one against me.

Strike Two: I've never been much of a fan of Joan Didion... I think it began in college…being forced to read Why I Write and On Keeping a Notebook. I didn’t enjoy being told, essay-like, how I should go about writing. It’s not my thing. That didn’t help that urge to rebel that goes along with college either. My Didion backlash was further proven when Up Close and Personal came out. Wait, you want to add Jessica Savitch to the list? Awww. Hell no. It just wasn’t happening.

Strike Three (??): Maurice bought this for me a few Christmases ago. I winced, like I usually did when receiving a book from him. Must I relive the college debacle? I can’t just NOT read it, because he WILL grill me on it. Buck up, Kim… read the damn thing already. This was 5 years ago and I just recently found it in the back of the bookshelf. I did end up reading it then… and I thanked Maurice time and again for giving me such a gift. Because, that’s what it truly was. Words can hold such extraordinary power..

So, here’s an enigma: Can cynics really believe in magical thinking? What is magical thinking anyway? I mean… yeah, I’ve read the Psychology Today articles, I’ve gone to freedictionary.com. Is it something that can actually be described or do you need to experience to fully get it? Talk to me.

See, because now I’m either going crazy or I’m seeing the signs. I’m remembering in distorted ways… did that really happen or is my head just trying to make me believe… am I replaying the events because I’m looking for clues?

Maurice is dead. I can type that. I can be matter-of-fact about it via keyboard. Hell, I can put it in a damn book review. But, you get me to actually SAY the words and I’m using the ol’ ‘Maurice has passed’, ‘Maurice is gone’, anything but the ‘D’ word. Like it may make it less real.

“In the midst of life we are in death.” Not just some awesome Smiths lyrics… but a common graveside prayer--and the rest? “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Still looking for clues. As I’m reading the first few pages of TYOMT again, I’m struck at how similar the process is:

“ Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner time, all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and filled our (I could not yet think ‘my’) otherwise empty house even after I had gone into the bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which still lay on a sofa a faded terrycloth XL robe bought in the 1970s at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them.”

This book is full of this type of sameness. Two peas in a pod, Joan and I. I may not be keeping his shoes because when he comes home he might need them (like Joan) but I’m still hanging on to that bottle of Moxie in the fridge…I’m still wondering if him telling me that morning that he wanted to hear my voice because it soothed him was really him telling me that I should have… what? What could I have done?

Joan has other tragedies… memories that stretch out to before I was born. She is insightful in such creative, tenacious, concise ways that sometimes I just want to curse her for bringing me there… for making me believe and start to question every action/memory/event of the last 20 years looking for the damn signs… because they were there, right?

In the midst of life we are in death. Don’t fucking forget that.

This is a hard book for me to review, as I know my own personal experience will be foremost. A big thank you to a wonderful friend who sent this to me after the loss of my own partner three weeks ago. So yes, this book is about grief and loss. It is Didion's own personal journey after the loss of her husband. The first lines in her memoir begin...
"Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity."
Those words resonated with me profoundly. She goes on to describe that grief is very different than loss. Loss can be the death of someone very close which causes sadness, pain, loneliness, etc., but still there is a distance. Still there is an ability to plan and remember things. Grief however is different, as it has no distance. She describes grief as the feeling of waves of distress, shortness of breath, and loss of memory, to name a few. I cannot say enough about how comforting that was for me. Not only did her words help me understand what was happening to me now, but also what I may experience in the future. While everyone responds to grief differently, there are some general "truisms." One's that Didion has found not only from personal experience, but research as well. I was reminded of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and her book on the five stages of death. What may seem the normal progression of feelings are often felt in no particular order or time.

I had never read Joan Didion before, so I did a little research on her writing. She was born way before social media, and the tell-all confessional types of writing seen today. When she wrote this in 2005, critics accused her of voyeurism. The experience of mourning was still believed to be private, and most thought it should remain that way. I find it interesting that this is the only piece I found missing from parts of her memoir.

In much of this book she has written more of the facts of her experience than her feelings. To think, 10 years ago this was seen as voyeurism? And yet, in keeping my own journal, I notice much of it is a recording of facts. Maybe in some ways one's emotions shut down as the shock to the body is foremost. I can only wonder in Didion's case, this coupled with the times in which she wrote, how explosive such details must have been.

I cannot help but feel Didion helped pave the way for many authors to reveal deeper emotions. For me, this sometimes factual account did not take away from the experience that is this book.

I highly recommend this to anyone who is going through a grieving process, or is interested in the affects grieving produces.

Il mio primo incontro con Joan Didion non era stato dei migliori.
In questo libro invece mi ha preso da subito, con una scorrevolezza e un'intimità difficile da trovare. Ognuno davanti a un lutto incommensurabile, alla vita che ti rivolta i giorni da un momento all'altro, cerca un modo per sopravvivere. La Didion ci racconta qui i suoi stratagemmi, la sua battaglia, che spesso mi sono trovata a condividere.
un libro sulla morte e la vita di chi resta, che mi ha aperto luci su altri letti di recente e che avevo messo da parte, incapace di commentarli.
Devo leggere qualcos'altro di lei.

3.75*

Ovo je knjiga koja se čuva za onaj neizbežan trenutak kad će nam biti potrebna. Možda bi mi se tad još više dopala. Svakako, mislim da su neki momenti bili suvišni, a drugi i neukusni. Preveliko je skretanje sa teme postojalo u sredini, opisivanje medicinskih procesa hospitalizacije njene ćerke, a neukusno mi je bilo konstantno pominjanje nekih "velikih imena" za koja nisam ni čula, a i da jesam bilo bi svejedno jer za priču uopšte nije relevantno koga su oni poznavali u mladosti.

To su zamerke, sve ostalo je bilo predivno i zasuzila sam više puta kroz knjigu

Before people think I'm callous and hard hearted, I have to emphasise how horrible I thought the events that Didion recounted in this book were. Having your husband die in front of you whilst your daughter is fighting for life in hospital is a truly terrible thing, and I'm amazed she could bring herself to write about it - this must have been incredibly hard for her.

Unfortunately I just couldn't love this book. I felt alienated by it more than anything else. Although the subject matter was incredibly personal, I found it far too detached, almost robotic at times. I found myself losing the flow and glazing over numerous sections that either name dropped people or places I had never heard of, or contained long-winded sections of complex medical definitions. I wouldn't say this book was badly written but it didn't strike me as beautiful but instead as very bare. I wouldn't say that Didion should have written it any differently, but I just didn't enjoy this book.

I didn't initially plan on starting with this book, feeling more drawn to her essay collections. I will read more of Didion's work in the future, but unfortunately this didn't blow me away like it did for so many others.