Talvolta, come scrisse Benjamin, l'atteggiamento di alcune persone che si aggirano per le pinacoteche rivela una malcelata delusione di trovarvi solo quadri. Con questo libro, sincero, disarmante, che non so come abbia fatto a scriverlo, mi è capitato esattamente il contrario: pensavo di trovarci solo l'elaborazione di un lutto, (ne ho trovati addirittura due, marito e figlia), il racconto di una serie di disgrazie, un'incolmabile tristezza, e invece c'è la fiamma che tiene vivi e i tentativi di rimanere a galla, la ricostruzione dopo le macerie, un certo godimento nel raccontare, che onora il marito e il suo mestiere di letterato. Socrate nel Fedone dice che una divinità avendo tentato un giorno di confondere il dolore con la voluttà, e non essendo riuscita, fece in modo che almeno in un punto aderissero insieme. Quella divinità in questo libro si chiama Joan Didion.

This wasn't exactly what I expected. I knew from an interview with Didion on Fresh Air that the book was written in the year that followed the death of her husband - A year she spent mostly in hospitals at her adult daughter's bedside. The daughter, Quintana, suffered various illnesses and injuries that year, all of them serious & potentially fatal. The medical odyssey had begun just five days before her husband's sudden death from a heart attack. He died, in fact, in the couple's living room having just returned for the night from their daughter's hospital room.

What I expected was a memoir of the piled-upon trajedies. I guess I did get that, just not how I'd imagined. I expected emotion and poignant anecdotes that would be intimate but also somehow metaphorical on the grand scale (she is a famous fiction writer after all, if anyone could deliver this it would be her).

Turns out, Didion is not a particularly emotive person. She is however a true believer that knowledge is power [reminding me of one of my favorite quotes] and she attacks both her grief and her daughter's poor health as a researcher and investigator. She quickly abandons the grief books of self-help ilk for actual, scientific and psychological studies and treatises. For medical manuals and calling in favors from medical professionals with whom she has one connection or another. Then she studies her self in a remarkably objective manner (perhaps aided by shock?) armed with this new knowledge.

I've read some of the other reviews of this book on goodreads and note that those that are particularly critical don't like the coldness with which Didion approaches the book but I took that as self-preservation. She had to keep moving or she might, literally, shrivel up and die. To explore her illogical behaviors (like keeping her husbands shoes even after giving up the rest of his clothes) and her increasingly tenuous grasp on the present (much of the book is expository, with Didion letting present details lead her back to various experiences that she analyzes and re-analyzes with the detriment of hindsight) is her way of keeping afloat. It's those very qualities of her grief, human and irrational, that made Didion, to me, a sympathetic author.

The 'magical' thinking in the title refers to her insistence throughout the year, though private and mostly subconscious, that if she could just analyze things correctly or do everything in a particular, precise way her husband would come back and rejoin their life. That's a desperation a lot of us can relate to - even if we muddled through it in ways very different from Didion's.

I enjoyed the reminiscing - a peek into the lives of two prominent U.S. authors of the last half century and those with whom they held court. I found Didion's research fascinating and more so the way she applied it to her own circumstance and then considered the data. The book made me think about my own choices and how I might reconsider them in the future, when things are different and the faux security of youth are gone.

Malo je neočekivano da od svih knjiga koje je Džoun Didion napisala ili priredila od vlastitih tekstova baš ova bude najnajnajveći i za sada najtrajniji hit. A možda i nije. Jer na kraju krajeva, ako postoje univerzalna iskustva, iskustvo gubitka je svakako jedno od njih, a Godina magijskog mišljenja upravo je njemu posvećena.
Godina... nije ni autobiografija ni memoari, već sažet opis prvih godinu dana proteklih od suprugove smrti, koji uključuje ne samo prirodni proces tugovanja već i borbu za život teško bolesne ćerke. Ta dva toka osećanja i postupaka neprekidno se ukrštaju i utiču jedan na drugi; negde blizu početka Didion citira Frojdovu tvrdnju da u sličnim situacijama jedno žalovanjeTM ometa ili odlaže drugo i to se bogami potvrdilo kao tačno u raznim varijantama i s raznim ljudima. Tako i njoj muževljeva naprasna smrt otežava napor da se nosi sa ćerkinom bolešću a ćerkina bolest, opet, usporava i komplikuje prirodni proces tugovanja za mužem.
Prikazi na GR nose haotično razbacane zvezdice, pet, jedna, pet, dve, i to sasvim mogu da razumem. Jer: na jednom nivou, da, gubitak voljene osobe je (nažalost) opšteljudska stvar koju su izbegli samo oni koji su umrli u detinjstvu ili ranoj mladosti, kroz to svi kad-tad prođemo i odbolujemo koračić po koračić. Na drugom nivou: eh, Džoun Didion ne samo da piše s pozicije beskrajno privilegovane osobe već i barem na prvi pogled (koji vara, ali da se ne upuštamo sad u to) blaženo nesvesna toga koliko joj novac i veze s poznatim i uticajnim ljudima olakšavaju život. I bogati plaču! ali siromašne to nekad iskreno izbezumljuje. Na trećem: ova povest je programski centrirana na samu autorku, na njene najsitnije i najtananije trepete nerava; o mužu i ćerki saznajemo praktično samo da su bili savršeni jer su bili njeni, o drugim ljudima ni toliko.
Pa ipak, kad se sve svede, Godinu vredi čitati makar zbog jedinstvenog spisateljskog trika da se piše o najbolnije intimnim stvarima tako da se one sagledavaju s ledenom distancom i uz apsolutnu retoričku virtuoznost. Nemojmo to brkati s gomilanjem prideva i purpurnim zakrpama: Džoun Didion poseduje istinsku veštinu da s minimumom reči postigne maksimum efekta. I kad se Godina uporedi s romanom A Book of Common Prayer, koji se začudo bavi vrlo srodnim temama, vidi se koliko je autorka uspešnija kad ne mora da se bakće s organizacijom zapleta i njegovom mehanikom, već "samo" da nam prenosi vlastite reakcije na svet koji je okružuje.

Nie trafiła do mnie. Trudno jest mi ją także oceniać przez jej autobiograficzny charakter.

'I hadn’t been able to think of food for days, so I had sent Higgins out for an hors d’oeuvres platter from Café Provencal. I was nibbling brie and beluga caviar on the deck, watching the sun set over the New York skyline and wondering how things could get any worse when Higgins brought me the phone. It was Gary.
My stomach lurched. Sequoia had collapsed at the bus terminal and been rushed to the emergency room, but there was no word as to what was wrong with her. I had to get to Los Angeles as quickly as possible, but first I had to find suitable accommodations. I called my close friend, Academy Award nominated film director Gérard Lupin.
“Gérard,” I said, overemphasizing the accent mark as he prefers, “Sequoia has fallen ill! I need to borrow your chateau for a few weeks while she’s in the hospital.”
“But of course, Jane,” he said. “You’ve already lost so much. You know, I once said to Jim, may he rest in peace, ‘Jim, you’re inarguably one of the most masterful writers of the 20th Century.’ And he said to me, ‘Yes, Gérard. I am. Second only to Jane, perhaps. I am truly blessed to have found someone as wonderful as her.’”
He paused, reminiscing. Then he spoke again, his voice thick with emotion. “I’m shooting with Sir Anthony Hopkins in Luxembourg (he says hello), but I will do anything I can to help.” He cleared his throat. “But what is Sequoia doing in France?”
“The California chateau, at the vineyard,” I said.
“Ah, of course,” he said sadly.'
That’s an excerpt from my upcoming Joan Didion parody, working title: “The Year of Entitled Thinking”. You may have correctly inferred from the tone that I didn’t much enjoy The Year of Magical Thinking. According to a friend who was able to generate a surprising amount of outrage in response to my disdain, this is because I am “not an adult”, but in speaking with her and reflecting on it for a few days, I think I’ve come to a somewhat more nuanced understanding of my viewpoint.
To begin with, this book is the very definition (by my standard, anyway) of creative non-fiction. Didion tells a very personal story entirely from her own perspective. In fact, the story is really about her perspective, her grief and corresponding inability to rationally accept that John is gone and won’t ever be coming back. She even goes so far as to underscore the extreme subjectivity of the narrative by pointing out a few times where her recollection of events explicitly differs from that of some of the other players. She does, on the other hand, also try to universalize it by citing experts/psychological studies on the grieving process and juxtaposing the information with her own experience, almost as if to say, “This happens to everyone, even Joan Fucking Didion .” It’s certainly interesting to think that this state of grief-stricken irrationality is so commonplace as to be almost scientifically quantifiable, although I’m taking her word for it. The narrative itself seems somewhat disjointed at parts, with Didion repeating herself or not making herself entirely clear, but I think that’s intentional, to better bring the reader into line with her state of mind at the time.
Thereupon sitteth, on an ostentatious, jewel-encrusted throne, my problem with the book, I think. Didion’s a great writer. She almost compels the reader to empathize with her, not just her emotions, but the state of temporary, borderline insanity she finds herself in. I really feel like I have a good idea of who Joan Didion is as a person, or at least who Joan Didion wants me to think she is, and that would seem to be a guiding purpose of autobiographical creative non-fiction. I have sympathy for her, especially having discovered that Quintana also passed away right before the book was published. But I don’t think I like her very much.
This is subjective, obviously. I got the impression that Didion is something of a literary star, inasmuch as such a thing exists any more. From whom did I get that impression? From Joan Fucking Didion, that’s who. I don’t know how to explain it better. I think if she had referred to herself entirely in the third person throughout: “Important Author Joan Didion didn’t have an appetite,” it would have fit my interpretation of her general tone. She name-drops in a way that I find fairly inappropriate given the context. She creates an image of a person who’s certainly living far more comfortably than anyone I know, and I find it difficult to muster that much sympathy. I’m sure there are at least three-billion people on the planet who’d trade places with Joan Didion in a heartbeat, even given these tragic circumstances, because it would mean that they weren’t going to starve or die of malaria or have their arms cut off by a roving gang of soldiers. Is that an unfair standard to hold this story to? Of course it is. But I found it to be fairly self-indulgent and self-reverential. And the fact that she seems to have anticipated that I might react this way and told me that she would have felt the same way at my age, but that her younger self and I are both wrong only strengthens my conviction. Who knows, maybe I’ll understand better when I’m an Old.
I don’t deny that Didion is a talented writer, but she seems to know it too and take herself way too seriously as a result. That is my perspective.

“In the midst of life we are in death.”

“I used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them,”

“I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.”

“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end,”

“The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it… Self-pity
remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given.”

“Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served only to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us.”

“Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.”

I read this incredible book five years ago but with the death of Joan Didion on 23 December 2021 from complications with Parkinson's Disease, I felt that I had to acknowledge how helpful she was with this book in the grief that I was suffering from at the death of my husband. She made everything right from what I thought of my own unusual behaviour at the time.

Such a slight, rather frail looking woman but within was a determined spirit.

The sentence that has remained with me always is:

…You have to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He [John] told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

Yes indeed. God is looking on this small bird, the sparrow. A fitting end for 2021 ...

RIP Joan Didion - 31 December 2021
___________________________________________________________

n  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. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves”.n

I cannot remember when I was last so moved by a book. It covers a sad subject, that of death with the subsequent grief and mourning periods but it amazed me with its lucidity of a woman who wrote this book a year after her husband’s death. In fact I was not going to bother writing a review but then my mind took over unfortunately.

I empathised with the author because my husband John died nearly two years ago. I kept a diary after his death and reading it now I realize that I was acting in a very strange way. I became very critical of couples who stayed together because they didn’t love their spouse but they were terrified of a future on their own. I also found that I became more sensitive to people who were pained and probably in a way, John’s death which was dreadful for me, was even more dreadful for him. He had gone. He could not return. And this is where Joan Didion magnificently displays her thoughts on how she felt when her husband John of nearly forty years died of a massive heart attack whilst they were having dinner in New York. Her writing is similar to a dream sequence. How could this have happened? Could she have prevented it? And then he was, as she believed, going to return to her. She refused to give her husband’s shoes away. He would need them for the return. She could accept his going with the funeral but then she was asked whether she could donate his organs. She reflected on this but believed that as he was not hooked up to a life support system when he arrived at the hospital that was not possible; obviously they wanted John’s eyes; the beautiful eyes of her husband.

In parallel with this dreadful situation, her daughter Quintana had fallen ill with what was initially believed to be flu, then pneumonia and then she went into complete septic shock. This happened a week or so before the unexpected death of Joan’s husband. But then we gradually learn that he had continual cardiac problems and he appeared to be aware that his own death was imminent.

Nevertheless, with the aftermath of grief, one wonders, what is grief and I can only assume that it is the initial part of mourning. Joan, a year later, realises that her behaviour had been odd and I believe is coming to terms with her loss. This book was published in 2005, a year after her husband’s death and I hope that she has come to terms with this and is fine. Memories will always be there but life continues. What other choice is there? Suicide. So easy to do but it can nevertheless be brutal. I was always so fascinated with Seneca’s suicide.

After a brief interrogation, Seneca was told to end his own life, which he did only with great difficulty. He severed his arteries, but he was so old and emaciated that the blood hardly escaped; so he asked for the hemlock that he had stashed away for just that purpose, but that had little effect either. He died only when his slaves carried him into a hot bath and he suffocated in the steam.

Joan’s daughter Quintana recovered but then became seriously ill a few months afterwards and so life continued with its anguish. Joan was left with the thought that she was there during her daughter’s illness but she would soon have to let go as Quintana had recently married. And what was Joan going to do with her life. I still have the same problem.

And the book ends beautifully:

…You have to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He [John] told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

I had to look this up about the sparrow. I had no idea that it was a hymn and that God continues to watch over us. I like that. It was an appropriate ending to an absolutely mesmerising and wonderful book, not read once but three times. Am I religious? Not in the past but my thoughts are indeed changing.

This was the third time I've read this book—I went to look up a passage, then ended up re-reading the whole thing. It's that good.

Oh wow. This was even better than I expected it to be. Absolutely perfect, with precise prose and incredibly resonant repetition.

“grief has its place but also its limits.”

Didion chronicles her life in the aftermath of losing first her husband and then her adult daughter. She speaks courageously of the familiar, the inevitable pain and the not-so-inevitable perseverance.

Joan Didion’s story is my story.

September 20th, 2021 was my son’s 36th birthday. On September 21st, the very next day, he died in a hospital ICU of Covid.

The term ‘Magical Thinking’ is a somewhat outdated* anthropological designation. It refers to spiritual conceptions of cause and effect. “The rains will come if we appease Krull with a dance” - that sort of thing. (*Any beliefs that weren’t held sacred in western culture were labeled “magical thinking”)

In grief, our rituals are often subtle. Somehow I thought that if I kept Joshua’s number in my phone or if I kept saying “my kids” (plural) instead of “my kid” (singular) then Josh wasn’t really gone. That was my magical thinking. Of course I knew the truth in my head, it was my heart that desperately grasped for the magic.

Six months ago, when Joshua was still very much alive and texting me daily about Sooner football and/or Chinese food (his favorite), this would have been a sad book to read. Three months ago, when I was divvying up his urned ashes between myself, his mother, his best friend Tony, and his beloved Aunt Pam, this would have been an impossible book to read. But now, in the midst of my own year of magical thinking, I find Joan Didion cathartic, helpful even.

I know at some point I’ll be able to say the ‘d-word’ and ‘Joshua’ in the same sentence without wincing, but not yet. At some point Josh will be that picture on my desk and those old HotWheels in my library and thirty six years of memories in my head and nothing more, but not yet. For now I still drive by his house and collect his mail. I still say “my kids.” I still have his number in my phone.

August 12, 2024 - My dad died this morning after struggling for several years with TBI induced dementia. After I read this glorious book for the first time I remember thinking that I wanted to make sure to give it to my mom, when my dad died. I guess today is the day. I’m trying to decide if I’m ready for a reread myself, or whether I’ll wait a few weeks. Either way, it’s up again soon, and I’m going to encourage her to begin when she is ready.

This is one of my all time favorites. I had a hard copy of it and read it right that afterAbsolutely breathtakingly beautiful. One of my all-time favorites.

***
Review originally appeared in the Charleston Gazette Mail, January 4, 2018.

Recently, Netflix released a documentary called “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” directed by the writer’s nephew, Griffin Dunne.

The movie was only fair, but it began with lines from the book many would say brought Didion to national prominence, her collection of essays, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” (the title taken from the glorious, terrifying final lines of the W.B. Yeats poem, “The Second Coming”).

It is a collection I’ve always meant to read, but hadn’t ever gotten to. And then, not three days later, it was offered as a “deal of the day” on Amazon or Book Riot or one of those websites that offers such things, and I decided it was kismet (what a Didion-like word). So I bought it and read it in a day.

For many years, to me, Didion was more of a character than an actual writer. I had read a few of her pieces here and there, but she seemed more the glamorous figure who started at Vogue, but, instead of writing pieces about skirt lengths and how to capture a man, was allowed to explore nearly anything she wanted.

She wrote pieces about self-esteem, politics, things quite unlike Vogue. I also read about her through pieces written by her brother-in-law, Vanity Fair columnist and novelist Dominick Dunne, who always spoke of her in glowing, almost other-worldly terms.

To him, she seemed one of the few women who was entirely equal, not only to her husband, Dominick Dunne’s brother, writer John Gregory Dunne, but to all.

She was this mythical figure, sylph-like at around 80 to 90 pounds, but carrying great weight as an essayist, novelist and a worthwhile observer of the human condition.

That is the Didion the reader sees in the essays in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” — a Didion interested in many things, in observing, in seeing why people do what they do.

But, she’s also surprisingly moralistic, not quite embracing the spirit of the ‘60s and ‘70s. See the title essay, where Didion spends time in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and her musings that “the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.”

In another essay, she skillfully mourns that quality we call “character,” noting we can only suffer from its absence, “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”

This essay, titled “On Self-Respect,” could have been written today, while others are, of course, a bit more dated. In 1968, I can only imagine Didion was quite a fresh voice, a woman writing about subjects typically tackled by men, and not only making no apologies, but not even really deigning to notice she was a woman.

Didion was certainly no saint; worries about money, having enough and making sure to appear to have enough were ever-present in the lives of Didion and John Gregory Dunne.

One might often forget Didion has a daughter for the few times she’s mentioned, but as a snapshot of a time period, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” was likely ahead of its time and holds up well today.

Didion continued to write, to publish, almost always alongside her husband. But I didn’t become keenly aware of her again — and again, through Dominick Dunne — until I read of her double set of losses.

First was the sudden death of her partner in all aspects of life, John Gregory Dunne, and the slow decline and ultimate death of her daughter Quintana. Quintana Roo Dunne was already hospitalized with the ailment that would ultimately lead to her death when John Gregory died.

Approximately a year and a half after John Gregory Dunne’s death, I began reading glowing reviews of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion’s memoir of the year following Dunne’s death, and I immediately bought a copy. I was floored.

Didion wrote about grief in a way I had never experienced before. She didn’t write as a believer in any particular god or afterlife. She didn’t look at loss on a grand or large scale.

She simply reported: what she felt, how she coped, how she didn’t. And it is perhaps one of the most painfully beautiful things I’ve ever read and one of my favorite books of all time.

It is the book I will take to my friend who has just buried a son. It is the book I will give to my mother when she loses my father. It’s not a self-help book with steps, exercises or anything like that. It is simply an examination of how one loses nearly everything, yet it makes objective examination of one’s own excruciating, exquisite pain.

She remembers. She regrets. She grieves. She lives.

And she acknowledges, “As I write this, I do not want to finish this account. Nor did I want to finish the year. The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for resolution and find none. I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.”

This is my first attempt to read anything written by Joan Didion. I picked up The Year of Magical thinking at a used book sale, after hearing her name thrown around in literary circles and not knowing anything about her. At this moment I'm only on page 76 and I don't know if I'll bother trying to make it to page 77 as the pretension is becoming unbearable.

The book is a series of essays she wrote after the death of her husband to whom she was married for 40 years. Little nuggets of Didion's poetic insight on grief gave me the momentum to keep going even as her words threw up some stumbling blocks of resentment as I couldn't help but compare her grief over the loss of her husband to my own grief over the loss of my sister. Didion had her husband for 40 years! I only had my sister for 32. What I would give for 8 more! (I realize this line of thinking would be equally offensive to someone who only had their loved one for 26 years, 18 years, 7 years, 7 months, or seven hours. Only eternity with our loved ones can sate us).

Not only that, but how damn lucky is this woman that she loved the man she was married to so intensely and so thoroughly for four decades!

These things I could get over, but when you throw in all her remembrances of trips to Cambridge, Malibu, Indonesia, Beverly Hills, St. Bart's, Palos Verdes and all the soufflés, creme caramels, daubes and albóndigas her husband ate at these places it gets to be too damn much. I don't even know what a daube or an albóndiga is and Didion repulses me to such an extent that I don't have any interest in finding out, either.