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The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir by Joan Didion. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography. In the book, Joan Didion takes the reader through the year following the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne (1932—2003). I picked the book because I reread William Zinsser’s Writing About Your Life recently and wanted to read a shining example to learn from, and who better than Joan Didion.
William Zinsser says in Writing About Your Life:
If you’re writing a memoir, choose one narrative that tells a coherent story and discard everything else. A memoir doesn’t try to be comprehensive; it’s only a slice of one person’s life or one family’s life. [1]
The Year of Magical Thinking is about grief and coming to terms with that grief. It is about the year following the sudden death of Joan Didion’s husband, and it’s about a life she lived with him. This was also the year in which her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne Michael was hospitalized with pneumonia and slipped into a coma. The book interleaves memories which include both John and Quintana and how Joan Didion deals with grief and pain.
In writing a memoir, William Zinsser advises:
Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory.[2]
Joan Didion begins her book as follows.
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.[3]
Joan Didion’s book is a collection of such incidents and memories that bring the year of 2004 alive and give us a peak into the 40 years prior, which she spent with her husband John and the years she spent with Quintana. This beginning sets the tone of the book and we can see the deep anguish and sense of loss the author feels.
Yet, the book is not all sad. Lightly written it brings to life the lighter moments any family would have lived, thereby helping the reader associate with the book.
In one instance, she talks of her marriage as such.
my intention for the ceremony had been to have no entrance, no “procession,” to just stand up there and do it. “Principals emerge,” I remember Nick saying helpfully: Nick got the plan, but the organist who had materialized did not, and suddenly I found myself on my father’s arm, walking up the aisle and weeping behind my dark glasses. When the ceremony was over we drove to the lodge at Pebble Beach. There were little things to eat, champagne, a terrace that opened onto the Pacific, very simple. By way of a honeymoon we spent a few nights in a bungalow at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito and then, bored, fled to the Beverly Hills Hotel.
I had thought about that wedding on the day of Quintana’s wedding.
Her wedding was simple too. She wore a long white dress and a veil and expensive shoes but her hair was in a thick braid down her back, as it had been when she was a child.
We sat in the choir at St. John the Divine. Her father walked her to the altar. There at the altar was Susan, her best friend in California since age three. There at the altar was her best friend in New York. There at the altar was her cousin Hannah. There was her cousin Kelley from California, reading a part of the service. There were the children of Gerry’s stepdaughter, reading another part. There were the youngest children, small girls with leis, barefoot. There were watercress sandwiches, champagne, lemonade, peach-colored napkins to match the sorbet that came with the cake, peacocks on the lawn. She kicked off the expensive shoes and unpinned the veil. “Wasn’t that just about perfect,” she said when she called that evening. Her father and I allowed that it was. She and Gerry flew to St. Barth’s. John and I flew to Honolulu.[4]
In the above excerpt, what also shines through is the writing, pleasing to hear with its repetitions and cadences adding to the tone of the piece. The rhythmic sentence structure as if bringing alive the choir at Quintana’s wedding giving much sensorial pleasure to the reader.
The book begins with what happened, Quintana’s hospitalization followed by John’s death, then moves onto the details and denial. It follows the path through grief, refers to existing norms and theories around mourning, customs and practices.
Joan Didion winds through what she calls a vortex, and theorizes her way to escape one.
I saw immediately in Los Angeles that its potential for triggering this vortex effect could be controlled only by avoiding any venue I might associate with either Quintana or John.[5]
In these episodes of slipping into a vortex, we see the author’s vulnerabilities. She has laid bare raw emotions all through the book: when she is in denial, when she tries to sieve through any premonitions she might have missed and when she tries to understand medical terms and procedures.
I can’t help but quote here what I read in William Zinsser’s book on writing a memoir.
Eileen Simpson represented all the memoir writers who incur what they know will be considerable pain to repossess their past. For Poets in Their Youth, a memoir of her life with her first husband, John Berryman, and his famously self-destructive fellow poets, Simpson had to revisit the collapse of that marriage and of the dazzling world it was built on. To write Orphans, which recalls her upbringing without parents, she did historical research on orphanhood that became so traumatic that she had to abandon the book several times. For Reversals she had to reveal the lifelong shame, carefully hidden as an adult, of having been a dyslexic child, the class dunce, unable to read, in the days before dyslexia was understood.[6]
William Zinsser goes on to say:
If you use memoir to look for your own humanity and the humanity of the people who crossed your life, however much pain they caused you, readers will connect with your journey. What they won’t connect with is whining. Dispose of that anger somewhere else. Get your intention clear before you start and tell your story with integrity.[7]
And Joan Didion does just that when she recalls in unforgiving rawness Quintana’s fear of a Broken Man in her dreams.
If the Broken Man comes I’ll hang onto the fence and won’t let him take me.
She hung onto the fence. Her father did not.[8]
In the end, Joan Didion with the metaphor of swimming a tide talks about accepting change.
I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.[9]
Book Title: The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
First Publisher: 4th Estate, 2005
Latest Imprint: Collins Modern Classics, 2021
[1] William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life (Da Capo Press, 2004), 111.
[2] William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life (Da Capo Press, 2004), 7.
[3] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 3
[4] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 70—71
[5] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 113
[6] William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life (Da Capo Press, 2004), 168.
[7] William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life (Da Capo Press, 2004), 173.
[8] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 219
[9] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 227
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