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.