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The Magician of Memoirs: a review of Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking'
By Kelly Skinner Splash! Magazine
Regardless the amount of success that a person may find in her marriage, career, or life in general is not important.
In the end, everyone dies. It doesn't matter if life was full of love or full of hate; these are the facts of life.
Death is the one thing that is guaranteed to be a shared experience for every living thing.
Since life and death are universal experiences, an extended essay encompassing one woman's year of loss may not prove to be groundbreaking. She may not teach readers anything that they don't already know about death. But what Joan Didion does do in her book, "The Year of Magical Thinking" is to capture what it means to have loving relationships.
The journal-like account, released in 2005 spans the one year period (2003) in which Didion is forced to face her husband's sudden death and her daughter's extended hospital stay due to serious illness. Beginning with the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion's book encompasses the following weeks she spends with her daughter, Quintana, at various hospitals; recalling her life with her husband and the potential death of her daughter.
Didion manages to keep the book poetically sad and somewhat hopeful despite the subject's natural inclination towards the more depressing. Day to day experiences like visiting Quintana in the hospital room or eating huevos rancheros at a restaurant have become pneumonic devices for Didion to recall her marriage with Dunne and the childhood of their daughter.
 | | The Year of Magical Thinking By Joan Didion October 4, 2005 $23.95 ISBN 978-1-4000-4314-9 |
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Not much actually happens in the book. Narrator, Didion, does little more than spend time in solitude or with her unconscious daughter at hospital rooms. Due to this, the reader spends the majority of the time in Didion's memory, recalling past fights and vacations. In simple, beautiful prose, the author recalls the understanding relationship she had with her husband, as a career partner and best friend.
Although exceedingly rich in detail and heart, the book drops off at times in terms of the presentation of new ideas. Granted, there is only so much a person can say about the death of two close family members before repetition becomes inevitable.
Somewhere towards the center of the book, Didion gets caught with where she wants her book to go, but eventually picks things back up again towards the end.
Despite the occasional melodrama and repetition in the novel, Didion does an excellent job of recapturing the feelings she has harbored for a year and of making herself accessible to others. She describes her loved ones as three dimensional characters with faults and ugliness; and by doing so, allows readers to share some sympathy and to find some wisdom from Didion's strong relationships.
While "The Year of Magical Thinking" may be somber at times, it is a book worth reading. Didion writes about death; this can't be denied. But the underlying truth of the novel is that love is what makes life worth living. It is the relationships that people create with others that makes them the people they are. Magical thinking is defined as the ability of people tying unrelated events to one another. Didion does this exceedingly throughout the book.
To her, with this bit of magic, the ones she loves will always b e alive. They are her life now as they always have been and this is her message more than anything.
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