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Name: The Year of Magical Thinking
Rating: 3.9 (77 reviews)
Author: Joan Didion

Joan Didion

Lessons of loss

3.9 (77 Bewertungen)

35 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is a poignant memoir that explores grief, loss, and the author's journey through a year of mourning.

Themen

Memoirs Western Philosophy Inspiration Trauma & Healing

Inhaltsübersicht

The Year of Magical Thinking
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What’s in it for me? Learn the lessons of loss from someone who experienced them deeply.

When we’re asked to describe ourselves, the first things that come to mind are usually our careers, hobbies, interests and so forth. But there’s another, arguably more fundamental factor that defines who we are as human beings. It’s the people who become the main characters in the stories of our lives, along with the relationships that provide those stories with much of their emotion, meaning and drama.

These people and relationships come in many forms: friends and enemies, lovers and ex-lovers, mentors and mentees. But the relationships that define us the most are those we have with the people we hold most dear. And of those, few can have a deeper impact on us than the ones we have with the family we choose – husbands or wives, sons or daughters.

Alas, some of these are capable of shaking us to our core when something terrible happens to them. And, of all the possible things that can happen, none are worse than a life-threatening illness or even death itself. Tragically, over the course of a single heartbreaking year between 2003 and 2004, the writer Joan Didion experienced both of these upheavals. First, through the death of her husband, and then through the illness of her daughter.

A note before we begin: Shortly before The Year of Magical Thinking was to be published, Didion’s daughter died. However, Didion chose not to revise her memoir and instead devoted another memoir, Blue Nights (2011), to tell the story of her daughter’s passing.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how tragedy took Joan by surprise;
how she dealt with its aftermath; and
what she learned from her painful experiences.

Joan’s story of loss began under circumstances that were simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary.

On the evening of December 30, 2003, Joan Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, sat down for dinner in the living room of their apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

In some ways, the circumstances were highly unusual. Joan and John had just gotten back from the intensive care unit of Beth Israel Medical Center, where their 37-year-old daughter Quintana had been hospitalized.

Five days prior, on Christmas morning, Quintana had been taken to the emergency room with what seemed like a severe case of the common flu. It turned out to be pneumonia, which soon began to spread, sending her body into life-threatening septic shock. By the evening of December 30, she was entering her fifth night of unconsciousness. Her chances of survival lay somewhere between 56 to 69 percent.

Needless to say, the possibility of their daughter dying weighed heavily on Joan and John’s minds. The death of a child is always one of the most heartbreaking prospects that a parent can contemplate, but in this case, it would have been all the more tragic given the fact that Quintana had just gotten married five months earlier.

On that day, July 26, 2003, she’d been a joyful bride – leaving the wedding ceremony at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine with her entire married life in front of her. Now she was lying comatose in a hospital bed – her debilitated body being kept alive by a breathing tube, arterial lines and IV bags delivering a host of antibiotics with grim-sounding names: azithromycin, clindamycin, gentamicin, vancomycin.

Those were the extraordinary circumstances in which Joan and John sat down for dinner on the evening of December 30. But in other ways, it was just an ordinary occasion – one of the thousands of dinners they’d had together in their almost 40 years of marriage. As on so many other evenings before, Joan made a fire, prepared a meal and fixed a drink for John.

They were in the middle of an equally ordinary-seeming conversation at the dinner table when it happened. John was saying something either about the scotch he was drinking or the historical significance of WWI – Joan can’t remember which. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped talking and slumped forward in his chair. Joan thought he was trying to play some sort of joke on her.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

John didn’t respond.

He wasn’t joking.

He’d just suffered a cardiac arrest.

Joan didn’t learn the full truth about what happened next until long after the fact.

The moments after John’s cardiac arrest were a blur for Joan. Not only was she in shock from the surreal-seeming events that were rapidly unfolding before her eyes, but certain key pieces of information were also withheld from her. Nonetheless, in the year that followed, Joan was able to reconstruct many of the details of what happened.

To do this, she had to go beyond her limited and unreliable perceptions and memories of the evening. Drawing on her background as a journalist, she supplemented her recollections with primary source documents, such as hospital reports and even the entry log kept by her apartment building’s doorman. By tracking down these documents and piecing them together, she was able to establish a precise chronology of the events that would change her life forever.

Amid the misfortune playing out around Joan, she sought a way to regain her agency.

It’s difficult to imagine anything more darkly absurd than filling out hospital admittance forms for someone already dead. When it’s a distressed wife filling them out for her beloved husband whose heart stopped beating nearly an hour ago, the absurdity borders on cosmic cruelty.

But while she was in the hospital reception waiting for news about John’s condition, Joan actually found some solace in doing the paperwork. To begin with, it gave her a sense of agency and usefulness. She was no longer expected to stand around as a passive observer, helplessly watching medical professionals do their work. She had something to do – something that she thought could help John with his recovery.

The next events in Joan’s story sparked a flurry of memories and associations in her mind.

Remember that at the very moment Joan was learning of her husband’s death, her daughter Quintana’s life was also hanging in the balance. In another medical facility across town, Quintana was still lying comatose in a hospital bed – her mind unconscious, her pneumonia and sepsis being treated and her condition remaining critical.

Fortunately, it stabilized and improved from there. About two weeks later, on January 15, 2004, the doctors were able to remove her breathing tube and reduce her intake of sedatives, which allowed her to finally wake up.

The memories and habits of Joan’s marriage formed the backdrop to her grief.

At times, it seems as if there’s a strange poetry to the stories of our lives. The more we look back on them, the more we find conspicuous rhymes and hidden relationships between the elements of which they are comprised.

That was certainly the case for Joan: Christmas, 1990; Christmas, 2003; St. John the Divine; Honolulu; Quintana’s illness; Quintana’s wedding; Joan’s marriage to John; the ups and downs of their lives together; their shared vocation of writing; John’s death; John’s funeral. As Joan traced the direct and indirect connections between places, times, events and experiences like these, she found an intricate network of invisible threads that wove them all together into a single, sprawling web of memory.

In her grief, Joan found herself swallowed by vortexes of memory.

In the immediate wake of John’s death, Joan could hardly go anywhere or do anything for more than a couple of minutes without being reminded of him. She’d be out driving, walking or simply living her life when, all of a sudden, she’d see something that would trigger a cascade of memories.

It could be as simple as passing the street of a friend they once visited together, or a movie theater where they’d seen a film decades ago. In any case, because of the web that linked all of her memories, one recollection would lead to another and then another, until her mind arrived at something painful.

At the bottom of Joan’s vortexes of memory were painful questions of “What if?”

In the late 1960s, when Joan wrote her first column for Life magazine, she didn’t want to be in Honolulu; she wanted to be in Saigon. The Vietnam War was raging and she yearned to be where the action was, covering one of the most important stories of the era. Instead, she was being asked to write a short personal column while staying in a place that most people associate with tropical beach vacations.

Given the gravity of what was going on in the world, the column seemed rather frivolous. Adding insult to injury, the magazine’s editor was sending reporters to Saigon – but only “the boys,” as he called them. She felt frustrated and humiliated.

Joan’s irrational forms of thinking led her to deny the reality of John’s death.

Sometime in late February or early March of 2004, about two months after her husband’s death, Joan finally gave in to the advice that many of her friends had been pushing on her. She started clearing the clothes out of John’s closet – an act she saw as one of the rituals that people go through to deal with their grief.

She began with a shelf of John’s outdoor clothing, which didn’t have much emotional resonance for her. He wore it when he went out for a walk, and he usually went out alone. Once she finished with the T-shirts and sweatshirts, she stopped.

Joan unexpectedly found a way to move forward.

In the end, Joan found limited closure in a manner that was both predictable and unpredictable: reading.

This was predictable insofar as Joan was both a writer and an avid reader, who had turned to books for insight ever since she was a child. But it was also unpredictable insofar as the piece of writing that helped her the most wasn’t a work of literature, psychology or self-help.

Seeking explanations for her experiences with grief, Joan turned to psychological and medical literature.

In the months following John’s death, Joan did quite a bit of reading before she received his autopsy report.

In addition to various works of literature, poetry and practical guides on grieving (most of which she found useless), she also read a diverse array of works from psychology and medicine. These ranged from the classics of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein to more contemporary articles in scientific journals and medical manuals that touched upon grief.

Joan learned the limits of her agency through the medical ordeals faced by her daughter.

When Quintana fell and injured her head, she and her husband were in the process of leaving Los Angeles International Airport. They’d just landed there from New York, arriving in California for a well-earned vacation to Malibu. After John’s death and Quintana’s various health travails, she and her husband wanted to restart their lives.

But now, instead, their lives were again in limbo – and so was Joan’s. As soon as she heard the news about her daughter, she flew out to California as quickly as she could. When she saw Quintana lying unconscious in a hospital bed at the UCLA Medical Center, her first words to her were equal parts reassurance and promise: “You’re safe. I’m here.”

Life goes on.

If you’re hoping for a happy ending to this story, you’re going to be disappointed. As Joan herself puts it, this isn’t like a movie in which the death of the husband is basically “the credit sequence for a new life” – a life in which the wife discovers that it’s possible to “love more than one person.”

As we’ve seen, there was more to Joan’s marriage than love, and there was more to the death of her husband than the loss of a single person. It was also the loss of their relationship. That relationship, in turn, was bound up in a thick web of memories and habits – a shared life no longer shared.

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Worum geht es in The Year of Magical Thinking?

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) is a poignant memoir about loss and grief. It tells the deeply personal story of Joan Didion’s experiences with the life-threatening illnesses of her daughter and the death of her husband. But more than that, it’s also a thought-provoking philosophical exploration of the meaning of mortality, the fragility of life and the mutability of everything that surrounds us.

Bewertung von The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year Of Magical Thinking (2005) is a deeply moving examination of grief, love, and resilience. Here's why this book is an essential read:

It offers a raw, honest portrayal of the author's experience with loss and mourning.
The book provides universal insights into the human experience of grief, making it relatable and comforting.
It serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of love and connection in our lives.

Experience the profound wisdom and emotional depth of The Year Of Magical Thinking.

Wer The Year of Magical Thinking lesen sollte

Anyone who’s felt anguish over another person’s life-threatening illness
Those who have experienced the loss of a loved one
Anyone who wants to understand the nature of grief

Über den Autor

Joan Didion was an American writer. Her critically acclaimed works span a wide range of genres and forms: literature, screenplays, memoirs, essays and journalism. They include Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which was one of the seminal works of the New Journalism movement; Play It as It Lays, which Time magazine named one of its “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005”; and the screenplay for True Confessions, which she co-wrote with her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

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