‘People who have recently lost someone have a certain look . . . one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness,’ observes Joan Didion in this painful memoir, which describes the first year of her widowhood after 40-odd years of marriage. She should know: the merest glance at her photograph confirms what the mirror must tell her, every day. Didion looks haunted, as indeed she is; haunted by grief, regret and longing. Mourners generally retreat behind closed doors, observed only by their closest family and friends. It is difficult not to feel slightly guilty for seeing her in this state. But any such reservations are out of place here, for Didion is effectively inviting the reader to stop sitting stiffly in the parlour and come and lie on the bed, with her. Taking the reader to places where they would not otherwise go is, of course, one of the things a really good book can do. The Year of Magical Thinking does just that, and brilliantly.
‘You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,’ she begins. So it was that she and her writer husband, John Gregory Dunne, were about to dine in their New York apartment when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Didion called an ambulance and her husband was taken to hospital. Even describing the events of this terrible evening, her self-knowledge has an edge of humour:
It is a charge which has sometimes been levelled at Didion, and one altogether refuted by this account. I found myself amazed to discover that Didion loves cooking (even keeps a notebook of what she cooked for whom, so she doesn’t repeat a recipe), or that the family use her mother’s best ruby crystal glasses at Thanksgiving; as if being a famous intellectual disbarred her, somehow, from the kitchen.‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ I heard myself say to the doctor. The doctor looked at the social worker. ‘It’s okay,’ the social worker said. ‘She’s a pretty cool customer.’
She mentions being ‘too offhand and too elliptical’, but this book is neither. Every reader who has mourned will recognise the way in which certain events are played over and over again, like a litany: would it have made any difference if X, did the person have a presentiment of death when they said Y? Most of us, when we imagine someone close to us dying, envisage a void. Didion tells how, actually, this void is filled with a clamour of what ifs? She keeps coming back to the memory of a distant summer, when, after writing all day, she and Dunne would go swimming in the sea together. Only towards the end of the book does she disclose that it was at the end of this same golden summer that Dunne’s heart condition was diagnosed. The serpent was in the garden, all along.
At the same time as her husband was dying, their only daughter was in intensive care, in a coma, suffering from septic shock. This part of the story makes the book not only sad, but harrowing. The Year of Magical Thinking isn’t one to take to the beach, or to cheer a long autumn evening, but it deserves to be widely read because it is powerful, moving and true.
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