What a downer of a book. What a name-dropper of a book. I had a hard time feeling anything for this lady. The book was filled with quotes or summaries of different articles the author had come across about coping with death, never any personal emotions she may have been going through, which made it so hard to care. She dropped names of all the intellectual people her and her husband ran with, all the intellectual activities they did, that by the time I was finished reading this, I had never felt so underpriveleged. I found this book very hard to relate to on so many levels

Pe cînd stau la masă, într-o seară, după ce și-au vizitat fiica, Quintana Roo, la spital, soțul lui Joan Didion se prăbușește fără suflare. O moarte subită, vor declara medicii.

Oare în ce constă „gîndirea magică”, menționată de Joan Didion în titlul acestui volum?

Am impresia că se referă la două lucruri. Cel dintîi este convingerea că seria întîmplărilor care se închide cu moartea subită a unui om e reversibilă. Dacă există moarte, există și posibilitatea de a o anula. Moartea nu poate fi ceva definitiv. Firește, cei care nu au fost afectați (deocamdată) de sfîrșitul unei persoane apropiate nu cred asta. Ideea e irațională.

Întreaga istorie a omenirii atestă definitivul morții. Nu putem cere, totuși, celor care au suferit o pierdere să gîndească exact ca noi. Pentru a depăși suferința, e nevoie, probabil, tocmai de această gîndire „magică”. Joan Didion notează: „Cu toate astea, eu nu eram deloc pregătită să accept vestea asta ca definitivă: la un anumit nivel credeam că ceea ce s-a întîmplat rămăsese reversibil: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible”.

Al doilea lucru care ține de această gîndire „alterată, magică” este credința „supraviețuitorului” că faptul morții cuiva ar fi putut fi evitat. Nimeni nu moare din senin. Moartea poate fi subită (ca în cazul de față), dar ea este anunțată de niște semne premonitorii. Totul e să le sesizezi și să le citești corect. Privind retroactiv, lui Joan Didion i se pare că, în multe împrejurări, a fost „oarbă” sau, cel puțin, neglijentă. Ar fi trebuit să-și dea seama că niște fulgere de culoare roșie (pe care le-a zărit într-o seară) îi anunțau, de fapt, un eveniment funest. Dacă ar fi priceput sensul lor, soțul ei, John Gregory Dunne, ar mai fi în viață.

Cînd moare un om, spune gîndirea magică, singurul vinovat e cel care rămîne...

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.”

Joan Didion ti voglio tanto bene

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.

“Una mosca indefensa queda atrapada accidentalmente en una telaraña pegajosa. El insecto propietario de aquel entramado aparece casi imperceptible, no por su tamaño (ya que es gigante), si no porque lo hace astutamente de manera silenciosa. Inyecta su veneno a la mosca y ésta queda rendida a su ponzoña. Unos minutos más tarde la mosca es deglutida por la araña. No se sabe por qué, pero para la mosca ha sido una muerte hermosa.”

Yo soy la mosca y Joan es la araña. He quedado rendido a su ponzoña. Me he dejado morir de una manera hermosa. “El año del pensamiento mágico” es una hermosa telaraña.

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

On December 30th 2003, Joan Didion‘s life changed forever. She and her husband John had just returned from visiting their daughter at the hospital, when he suddenly broke down at their dinner table and unexpectedly passed away. Didion reflects:

"

I read this book in grad school and cried my eyes out. A GR friend is currently reading it, and her brilliant highlights/notes reminded me that I should revisit this text. A few moments that moved me:

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death.”

and

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

Kind of a Heart of Darkness journey to visit at the end of this year, but it hits.

File Under: “As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day be not at all.”

Click here to hear my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.

I've seen this book mentioned as something spectacular in more than one place, but I can't really understand why... Parts of the author's thoughts on grief and habit are interesting, but I do agree with some other reviewers regarding the name-dropping. Why does the author have to mention the full names of absolutely everyone, whatever little role they played in the story?

This book would probably have been more interesting if it was written by someone not so extremely privileged. How do people who have to actually deal with things handle grief? Didion has people who do everything for her, she has like a hundred helpers. There's also something in the writing (or possibly the translation) that makes the grief and sadness a bit distant.

Nie odbieram autorce prawa do opisywania własnych niewątpliwie trudnych przeżyć w taki sposób, w jaki ma ochotę, jednak jak dla mnie „Rok magicznego myślenia” jest zbyt mocno osadzony w realiach klasowych Didion. Nie przemawia do mnie porównanie czytania dokumentacji medycznej do prób zrozumienia gramatyki języka obcego na zagraniczne wycieczce, nie trafiają opisy przelotów samolotem do San Francisco na kolację, bo „wszyscy tak robili". Takich elementów jest wbrew pozorom bardzo dużo, przez co jeszcze bardziej dystansuję się od treści, a ja gubię się w gąszczu nazw ekskluzywnych restauracji, hoteli i nazwisk „wybitnych eseistów". To nie jest to, czego szukam w literaturze.