“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”



There was a lot to think about in Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinkingespecially about grief and identity. I just felt that the way grief was intellectualized made this grief seem less immediate and less personal. Despite a moving account in The Year of Magical Thinking, it did not work for me. In my view,Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains Didion's seminal work and the one I'll go back to when I think about how good a writer Joan Didion is.

Quiero recordar la honestidad y la lucidez con que está escrito este libro. Me gustó que sea una novela autobiográfica, pero a la vez crónica y ensayo. Me gusta cuando los formatos desaparecen o se mezclan o se desdibujan. En los desbordes aparecen los monstruos.
Le dije a un amigo que mi vida estaba cambiando mucho y él me dijo: tienes que leer El año del pensamiento mágico, de Joan Didion. Es la crónica del primer año de su viudez. Y su pensamiento es mágico porque es desquiciado, porque no responde a ninguna lógica, porque aunque sabe que su marido murió, desea que regrese e intenta torcer la realidad a favor de ese deseo y vive como si pudiese controlar que se concrete.
Últimamente pienso mucho en por qué soy tan ansiosa, por qué sufro por adelantado y antes de emprender cualquier proyecto, prefiero no hacer nada porque siempre avecino finales catastróficos. Entendí que eso es miedo. Como dijo el burrito de Shrek: el miedo es la respuesta sensible ante una situación desconocida. Joan Didion tiene miedo, está cagada de susto de vivir sin su marido, porque no sabe cómo vivir sola después de décadas de estar casada. Enviudar es una situación desconocida. Vivir sin las personas que queremos es impensable. Pero nada es para siempre. Lo único permanente es el cambio. No sé por qué aunque una sabe eso, le teme tanto. Cuesta vivir, porque no se puede acomodar la vida al propio gusto.

Hay páginas completas que transcribiría para abrazar, no olvidar y compartir. Por ahora, sólo compartiré mis frases favoritas:
“La vida cambia de prisa, la vida cambia en un instante. Te sientas a cenar y la vida que conocías se acaba”.
“Mi forma de escribir es mi forma de ser”.
“La capacidad de anotar algo cuando se te ocurría era lo que marcaba la diferencia entre ser capaz y no ser capaz de escribir”.
“Me sorprendí a mí misma preguntándome, sin experimentar sensación alguna de falta de lógica, si la cosa (su muerte) también había sucedido en Los Ángeles”.
“Yo no estaba preparada para aceptar que la noticia fuera definitiva: a cierto nivel seguía creyendo que lo sucedido todavía era reversible. Por eso necesitaba estar sola. Necesitaba estar sola para que él pudiera volver”.
“Yo había estado igual que los niños, como si mis pensamientos o deseos tuvieran el poder de darle la vuelta a la narración y cambiar los resultados”.
“¿Cómo podía volver John si le sacaban los órganos, cómo iba a volver si no tenía zapatos?".
“No para de remembrar una y otra vez la escena, como si el hecho de repetirla pudiera revelar un final distinto”.
“¿Cómo pudo pasar esto cuando todo era normal?”.
“No dónde están ahora, cuando llevan siete años muertos, sino ¿dónde están los que eran entonces?”.
“En la vida pasan cosas que las madres no podemos impedir ni arreglar”.
“Durante la mayor parte de mi vida, yo había compartido la misma fe esencial en mi capacidad para controlar los acontecimientos”.
“Yo ya había comprendido, porque era una persona que había nacido con miedo, que en la vida había cosas que yo nunca tendría capacidad para controlar o dirigir. Que había cosas que simplemente sucedían. Y esta era una de aquellas cosas. Te sientas a cenar y la vida que conocías se acaba”.
“Cuando acababas golpeando por otro coche era cuando intentabas dar marcha atrás”.
“Todas las mañanas me fijaba en las mismas pancartas que ondeaban atadas a las farolas de Wilshire: “UCLA Medical Center: El n.°1 del Oeste y el n.°3del país entero”. Todas las mañanas me preguntaba quién habría hecho aquel ranking”.
“Broma privada (…) expresión privada de mi familia”.
“No creía en la resurrección del cuerpo, pero aun así creía que, si se daban las circunstancias adecuadas, John volvería”.
“La vida es breve pero dulce”.
“Los supervivientes miran hacia atrás y ven presagios, mensajes que se perdieron”.
“Recuerdo que intenté tranquilizarme viendo la situación como si fuera una película de Hitchcock: todos sus planos estaban planificados para aterrorizar pero en última instancia era un artificio, un juego”.
“Eso habría violado un precepto básico de la física moderna: resulta imposible ir hacia atrás en el tiempo”.
“Se refería a hacer cosas no porque se esperara que las hiciéramos ni porque las hubiéramos hecho siempre o tuviéramos que hacerlas, sino porque nos daba la gana. Se refería a querer hacer cosas. Se refería a vivir”.
“Te falta una persona y ya ves el mundo vacío”.
“Pensamiento correctivo”.
“Yo no podía contar las veces durante un día normal y corriente en que surgía algo que yo necesitaba contarle a John. Y este impulso no acabó con su muerte. Lo que terminó fue toda posibilidad de respuesta”.
“Cualquier respuesta que él me diera solo podía existir en mi imaginación”.
“Cuando lloramos a nuestros seres queridos también nos estamos llorando a nosotros mismos. A quienes éramos. A quienes ya no somos”.
“El tiempo es la escuela donde aprendemos”.
“Mientras rememoro esto, me doy cuenta de lo abiertos que estamos al mensaje persistente de que podemos evitar la muerte”.
“Y a su correlato punitivo, el mensaje de que si nos pilla la muerte, los únicos culpables somos nosotros”.
“Nada de lo que él y yo hubiéramos hecho o dejado de hacer había causado su muerte ni tampoco la podría haber evitado”.
“¿Por qué había pensado yo que esa improvisación podía durar para siempre?”.
“Lo que le confiere tanta nitidez a esos días de diciembre de hace un año es su final”.
“Como nieta que soy de un geólogo, aprendí muy pronto a tener en cuenta la absoluta mutalibidad de las colinas, las cascadas y hasta las islas. Cuando una colina se hunde en el océano, yo veo orden en ello”.
“No quiero terminar el año porque sé que (…) mi noción del mismo John, del John vivo, se volverá más remota, más “difusa”, desdibujada, transmutada en lo que sea que sirva mejor para vivir sin él”.
“John nunca tenía miedo. Había que sentir el cambio del oleaje. Había que seguir aquel cambio”.

Y frases que yo anoté al borde de mis destacados:

“El duelo es convivir con el deseo permanente del regreso del otro”.
“Lo que no se nombra no existe”.
“El duelo es la espera eterna”.
“La honestidad más brutal”.
“Buscar demasiadas explicaciones es una forma de control”.
“Te equivocas cuando intentas volver a la felicidad de antes, porque ya se fue, ya no hay vuelta”.
“Vivir de recuerdos”.
“Vivir de ilusiones”.
“Una choca por alcance si intenta ir en reversa”.
“Tiene miedo, se autoflagela, quiere controlar y siente culpa, ¿por qué no puede relajarse?”.
“Se obliga a no pensar y no sentir lo que de verdad siente, ¿por qué?”.
“Somos gente del pasado”.
“Vivir es improvisar”.
“Todo desaparece, nada es para siempre”.

Una belleza de libro. No quería terminar de leerlo, pero se acaba, como todo en la vida.

--------------

Segunda vez que lo leo y vi otras cosas, la muerte me habló de otra forma. Es raro decirlo, pero la muerte que yo enfrento es diferente a la de Joan Didion. Para mí no murió mi compañero de vida, murió mi papá, murió la forma en que amo a los hombres que amo.
Me sorprendió la importancia que da Didion al agua, al mar, a las piscinas, a las tormentas, a las lágrimas. El agua como metáfora del estado emocional. Bello.

"La vita cambia in fretta. La vita cambia in un istante. Una sera ti metti a tavola e la vita che conoscevi è finita".

E' proprio quello che succede a Joan Didion, la cui vita subisce una brusca e dolorosa impennata. "L'anno del pensiero magico" non è solo il racconto dell'elaborazione del lutto, ma è molto di più. Non è solo la storia di una perdita e di come si sopravvive, ma è anche la storia di un amore, di un matrimonio durato 40 anni. E' l'amore tra Joan Didion e John Dunne, due scrittori, giornalisti, che non solo hanno condiviso la loro vita insieme, ma anche il lavoro. Entrambi lavoravano a casa e contavano l'uno sull'altro per qualsiasi evenienza o necessità e nel momento in cui l'altra parte di te viene a mancare il tuo mondo crolla.
Joan Didion tenta di sopravvivere alla morte del marito, leggendo, riflettendo sul dolore, su come nasce e su come trasforma l'essere umano, adotta delle vere e proprie strategie di sopravvivenza per riempire i giorni bui. L'anno magico del titolo si riferisce alla capacità di accettare il cambiamento e abbandonarsi ad esso, lasciando andare le persone che abbiamo amato, perché vivere e andare avanti comporta anche questa rinuncia. Non è e non vuole essere un libro strappalacrime, ma è semplicemente il racconto di un grande amore e della capacità di guardare avanti, nonostante tutto.

For me this book was all about the tension between my hateful, all-consuming envy of Joan Didion for being a rich, brilliant, famous, cool, successful writer with the perfect life, and her obvious point that none of that stuff really matters.

I mean, okay, it is way better to stay at the Beverly Wilshire hotel while your only daughter's bruised and swollen brain and dying body are scalpeled apart by the best trauma doctors in the country. This is better than, say, having your daughter get only treatment Medicaid allows and visiting the city hospital when you finish the second shift at your dead-end job, which you have to go to, even though you're insane with grief and terror, because you're one paycheck away from homelessness. As people on here seem fond of noting, yeah, it is way better to have money during such events, and really it's probably nicer to be Joan Didion, rather than somebody else, in most situations, especially ones like these.

But it still sucks. A lot.

Being Joan Didion and having all her giant heaps of money, brains, and talent, is not currency with much value in the places she travels to in this book, which is part of what makes it such an interesting read, instead of just a well-written and deeply personal description of grief, which, of course, it also is.

"Grief is different. 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."

In The Magical Year of Thinking, Joan Didion creates a cerebral, searing, and brutal portrayal of grief. Just days before Christmas of 2003, Didion's daughter, Quintana, fell ill and began life support. Then, while eating dinner around a week later, Didion's husband, John, suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In this book, Didion attempts to pull apart the vestiges of her former reality and reflect on her marriage and her family, before she lost her life as she knew it.

There does not exist one right way to grieve. Didion has an analytical, academic approach to her grief, at least as she portrays in it The Magical Year of Thinking. She approaches concepts such as the meaningfulness of death and the castigation of self-pity with unflinching honesty. As someone who has love and lost, I found Didion's approach heartrending and intriguing, even if I myself could not relate too much to the way she processed emotion. The book felt slim, and Didion's writing packs a punch, even if their impact fell in similar ways at times.

Recommended to those who can handle a more stoic and objective representation of grief. Not my favorite book ever, but I believe that some might relate to it, in particular those who find poignancy in the words left unsaid, or the emotions that remain unexpressed.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is an emotional and heartbreaking memoir winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Joan Didion, a renowned essayist and reporter was married to esteemed writer and novelist John Gregory Dunne for forty years. Their beloved daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was critically ill with complications from the flu in December 2003. They had returned home from the hospital sitting down to dinner when John suffered a massive cardiac arrest and died. What follows is a year of "magical thinking" as Joan Didion processes what she is going through in the only way she knows how, by writing her thoughts. This writing, at times is so raw and emotional that I found myself saying I shouldn't be reading this, but read it I did. Although, there were times in this book that were almost unbearable in its honesty, I'm glad that I finally read this most important book. Joan Didion is an amazing writer and I will definitely read more of her works.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it."

ADDENDUM: December 23, 2021 It is with great sadness that I learned of the death of one of our most talented writers from the 1970s documenting the societal upheaval. A few years ago I picked up a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking and I realized what a talented writer that I had missed over the years. And as I am loving reading all of her works, I am sorry that she is no longer with us.

There were many beautiful and moving passages in this book, but there are also some tedious aspects. I feel like a brute for criticizing what is essentially Didion's grief diary after her husband died, but some complaints have to be made. Didion gets too bogged down in the hours and days and minutiae of her husband's autopsy report. Also, parts felt like an academic paper because she kept quoting medical studies -- all part of the attempt to make sense of the autopsy.

Those kinds of details are best left scribbled in a notebook. I would rather have had those pages filled with more memories of her husband and daughter, who was also hospitalized during this time. (And very sadly, Didion's daughter died after the book was finished.)

But it's still a remarkable book, despite the minor annoyances. And I will give Didion the highest compliment I can give a writer, which is that I want to read more of her work.

Sidenote: This is the third grief memoir I've read in about six months, the others being "Love is a Mix Tape" and "An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination." It's been interesting to see how the different writers have coped with a loved one's death. An incident Didion relates is when she refuses to give away her husband's shoes after he died, because she "magically" believes he will return and will need them. There was a similar heartbreaking scene in "Mix Tape," when Rob Sheffield unplugs the landline telephone and carries it around with him, under the delusion that his wife (who died the previous day) is simply lost and will try to call him -- even though the phone isn't plugged in.

The point is that no amount of reading or planning can prepare you for the time when "you sit down to dinner, and life as you know it ends." But these books will remind me to be more gentle with myself, and others, when a dark day comes and we find ourselves carrying around an unplugged telephone.

How do you review, and by doing so, judge a book of this nature? I think, perhaps, best not to.

This is an account of one person’s journey through grief, and the acceptance of her husband’s death. It is intensely personal. So therefore should not, I think, be subjected to the same review process as say, a work of fiction or an essay might.

Being so personal then, why did she write it? I think it’s clear that this book was her catharsis. Both Joan and her husband John were highly successful writers after all.

It is of course deeply moving, and yet not sentimental.

Joan Didion was a writer of stunning talent, primarily a journalist and then of course a novelist and screenwriter. I read a review of her work in general, which describes “her unique style, restrained yet honest, affecting yet never sentimental, is peerless.” And that voice is very clear here too.

It is a tragically beautiful book.

If you’ve not read much Didion, or in fact any, then I would definitely recommend watching the Netflix documentary ‘The Centre Will Not Hold’ before you read this book.

I can’t believe I finished this book. Honestly, reading articles about plankton in the encyclopedia is more thought and emotions provoking than “The Year of Magical Thinking”.

Didion’s writing is completely divorced from any real feeling, or emotion. I got the feeling that her husband’s death was simply an interesting event to write about and get attention from. I kept on reading in hope for something more, a conclusion, the gained knowledge, the depth of thought she should have gained during all those years, anything... Instead she continued with merely describing her very privileged lifestyle, who she knew and the places she have been, like the Cannes Festival, Sain-Tropez, Jardins du Luxembourg in Paris. All that made me as a reader hate this book even more.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t need this to be a soppy read to make some sense to her grief, no. The problem with this memoir is that the author treats her experience as if it is unique rather than universal. The reader reads about the suffering but doesn’t experience it to the point. This is the first book of this kind that I read where author quotes other people, mostly scientists, to describe what she was going through and her feelings about death and grief.

When I was reading about the illness of her daughter... Gosh, I thought it was written by a robot. It angered me! How one can be so self indulgent and emotionally detached when writing about such things. I just don’t understand. What a waste of time and money.

I finished Joan Didion's acclaimed memoir in the summer, but didn't write a review. By now, you know what it's about: the sudden death, in 2003, of Didion's husband and frequent literary collaborator, John Gregory Dunne, which happened while their daughter, Quintana, was hospitalized with pneumonia and then septic shock.

Didion recounts everything in her characteristic detached observational style. If she can capture everything just so, you get the sense she was thinking, perhaps she'll find some meaning to it. Sometimes the effect is deeply poignant, while at other times it feels cold.

Didion, one of the least sentimental writers around, explores themes of grief, chance and fate with skill and intelligence. Among other things, it's a lovely memoir of a marriage. It's worth pointing out, however, that Didion is writing from a place of extreme privilege. Beyond that, I'll say no more.

Perda, dor, sofrimento, autopiedade são os ingredientes principais do ano que se segue à morte do marido da autora, ano esse em que tem de lidar também com os muitos internamentos da única filha.
Parece-me um diário apaixonado e sincero, a confissão do desamparo de quem vê partir o companheiro de quatro décadas e se sente impotente e sem rumo.
Tocou-me particularmente, sobretudo porque o li meses após ter perdido a minha única irmã e por ter sido invadida pelas mesmas dúvidas e questões. Será que eu podia ter evitado o que aconteceu? Quem sou eu agora?

What has stayed with me most from this book is her idea of "the shallowness of sanity." We move through life as though our days aren't numbered; death or tragedy shocks us into another mental state. "Sanity" involves a kind of denial of mortality.