The Year of Magical Thinking

I never liked the term Magical Thinking. To me it's a term people use to characterize the way others think--others not rational like themselves. Not long ago, I read Thinking Fast and Slow. (The Insert book/author feature isn't working today). The author, Daniel Kahneman, takes pains to indicate the types and occasion in which people think less than rationally. He didn't include grief among those occasions. I always took irrationality as the norm--the first draft of thinking edited later to clean it up.

Joan Didion finds her self thinking her dead husband will return but she knows he won't. Her internal magician isn't fooling her. She knows it's just a game she's playing with herself because she wishes he could return. The suddenness of his death in an "ordinary instant" disrupts the natural editing process and she becomes aware of this aspect of her thought process. It's temporary. A year later at the end of the book, she already sees herself reverting to the unmagical ordinariness.

When I started the book, her almost Virginia Wolfian stream of consciousness drew me right in. Unlike Virginia Wolfe, Joan Didion adds a layer of obsession tying everything together. She consults the literature, she searches her memory and revises what she finds, she documents the threads holding her relationships together--relationships that are in the process of going or already gone and we experience the intimacy of it. And then we experience the loss of it.

These are the moments when the book is at its best. At other times, her obsessions remove us from the intimacy. This is what obsession is meant to do. It's a mental trick to remove us with distracting repetition from overwhelming or unpleasant emotions. Other reviews have called Ms. Didion cold because she's more of the obsessive than the hysteric they would prefer. I don't share their preference.

Nor am I bothered as other were by the fabulosity (yes, spellcheck, I'm aware you don't think that's a word) of her life. They complain of her name-dropping or wealth-flaunting but that's just who she is and how she lives and it doesn't protect her from what she has to experience.

I have never read her fiction. I'm afraid I won't like it. I like her though--the "her" of this book and of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem, so I'll give it a chance at some point.

By an unnatural coincidence, during the week that I started reading this book my brother collapsed, and was subsequently diagnosed with terminal cancer. I finished the book, in between tending to him, but must admit to a certain level of distraction. And I took it very personally.

So I'm afraid that this is going to be a very self-indulgent review, wallowing in self-pity, as it were.

First off, Joan Didion wrote this book as a form of therapy. This is something that I's going to have to try. Actually, I suppose that that's what I'm doing right now. (By another coincidence, when reading to Karl from the Scientific American that had just shown up in his mailbox, I came across an article on the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, theorizing that this is part of what's caused the recent explosion of blogging.)

Didion found solace in poetry - reading it, quoting it, looking it up - even, to some extent, writing it. I'm finding solace in music - stuffing a piece of music, usually a hymn tune, in the back of my head and letting it loop throughout the day.

She also experienced denial. (Isn't this supposed to be the first stage of grief?)
I desperately hung on to the shreds of my own denial, until one of his doctors, dancing around the hard truth, told me that any possible treatment would not be 'curative'.

And Didion poked around in the past, looking for omens that she should have noticed. We did that too. He seemed fine when I last saw him, in early May. But. He'd been having headaches. And he needed help in moving our parents' TV.

In the end, Didion finds acceptance. That hasn't happened to me yet and isn't likely to, not for awhile.