The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion About the Book From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion.
That internal voice, . It says that reading the obituary would be a betrayal. Didion quotes the mother of a 1. Kirkuk who tells herself that as long as she doesn't let the uniformed messenger into her house, he cannot deliver the news she knows he is bearing.
On the other side, equally evasive, more subtly irrational, there are the voices of society. When a friend tells us about a terrible diagnosis, we may need to respond with an anecdote about someone we know whose brother- in- law survived just that illness with no problem, or we need to tell about an herbal tea that produces miraculous cures. Telling those in grief that they are . These stoical platitudes represent a communal, anonymous kind of magical thinking or denial of reality. With her perfect- pitch ear for plausible humbug, words used to dismiss or look away from a reality, Didion notes a social worker on the night of the death telling the doctor: . Require sedation?
This language of privilege that knows its resources, too, becomes at a certain point an evasion: everyone alive, all of us, are at best temporary kings. These social voices are at an intimate level. On another level, there are the larger, more official voices of organizations and of history. The daughter recovers, then has another medical crisis, so that we can hear the jargon of hospitals, the argot and manners of nurses, in New York and Los Angeles. No easy joke at their expense: in Didion's account her own protective ferocity is at least as comic as the covert bullyings and evasions of the health professions.
From a general summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes, the SparkNotes The Year of Magical Thinking Study Guide has everything you need to ace. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), by Joan Didion (b. 1934), is an account of the year following the death of the author's husband John Gregory Dunne.
Her daughter eventually survives the second crisis too, events thus supplying a double plot: grief and anxiety. As Didion remarks, grief is . Here is a striking, characteristically unexpected and revealing sequence of contrasting efforts to mine culture for germane words about grief. First, Didion recalls a college professor talking about Walter Savage Landor's 1. Then, in a phrase that impressed the undergraduate Didion, the teacher praised the .
About The Year of Magical Thinking. From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely. The Year of Magical Thinking . From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric.
She describes the defenseless, disoriented look that is the face of grief, then returns to the classroom memory. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves in the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.
On the night John died we were 3. You will have by now divined that the 'hard sweet wisdom' in the last two lines of 'Rose Aylmer' was lost on me. The exaggeration of the poem's hyperbolical opening is vindicated: it seems that in grief we need the most extravagant gestures hyperbole can devise. But that need has a counterweight or opposite, as well.
Didion remembers the poem and the professor and she also reads other books, including medical texts. She wants their precise knowledge as she wanted an autopsy performed on her husband's body. In psychiatric writing about bereavement she finds the sentence, . Didion quotes an extended passage remarkably superior, in form and content, to the medical .
She justly respects this for its cogency and insight: . No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them cold, their distress makes them unstrung, sleepless. She makes observations about the physiology of grief - which is to say, about the body, that boundary area between the mountainous regions of grief inside and the busy, preoccupied world of society outside. Emily Post undertakes the acknowledgment and incorporation of grief as part of the ordinary world - not as the special work of experts like the social worker at Beth Israel North, ready to relieve the doctors and stand in for that old set of customs and practicalities. Didion says of Post's chapter, . Post would have understood that.
She wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed. Literally conservative in the old sense of .
Unsentimental, amused, impatient with cant, she has been a meticulous observer of social changes less in themselves than in their effects on her own sensibility. Or he may have meant that I had been right in the 1. I wanted to buy a house in Honolulu. I preferred at the time to think the former but the past tense suggested the latter.
He said these things in the taxi between Beth Israel North and our apartment either 3 hours before he died or 2. I try to remember which and cannot. Didion is ultimately less like a camera than a precise seismograph. Frank Bidart in his poem . In Didion's formulation.
Didion makes a distinction between grief, which is passive, and mourning, which like Mrs. Post's instructions is active.
She adduces Stephen Hawking's announcement that he was wrong 3. The Times reported this change of mind in 2. This live, sharp, memorable book notes that distinction and embodies it: . Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star. Within the book, the two outcomes are different, but in August her only daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, died in a New York hospital.
The news story reporting this event closes with Didion's response to the idea of changing her book at this point.