Things that Joan Didion taught me about grief
'Like gilded threads in a fabric, the details energise her writing – triggering intense emotions and drawing us deeper into Didion’s fractured life at that time.'
Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking is widely recognised as one of her greatest works.
Published in 2005, and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it chronicles her struggle to come to terms with the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne.
Reading this book taught me so much about grief.
In particular, it made me realise that revisiting and recounting memories is central to the whole process of grieving.
The Year of Magical Thinking is a stream of poignant memories: the night Didion’s husband lovingly recited a passage from one of her books (‘I remember the tears coming to my eyes. I feel them now’); the birthday gift he gave her when he still had ‘twenty-five nights left to live’; the moment, days before his death, that he jotted down, in faint pencil, the names of all twelve of the characters who had died in his most recent novel; and the glass of whisky Didion handed him seconds before he suffered the heart attack that killed him.
As if she was trying to keep her husband alive by showering us with memories of him, The Year of Magical Thinking is full of poignant details.
Like gilded threads in a fabric, the details energise her writing – triggering intense emotions and drawing us deeper into Didion’s fractured life at that time.
The Year of Magical Thinking is also an amazingly honest portrait of Didion’s journey from confused denial to a degree of clarity and acceptance.
Reading about her subconscious impulses was so thought provoking.
For example, her husband’s autopsy report arrived nine months late because, when asked to fill in a form on the night of his death, she mistakenly wrote the address of their first home – one they hadn’t lived in for decades.
And she managed to give away most of his clothes, but, for months, held on to his shoes in case he needed them when he returned.
Other poignant sections included her endorsement of Melanie Klein’s categorisation of grief as a complex form of manic depression.
I was also struck by Didion’s perception of funerals – which, rather than a moment of finality or completion, she described as ‘a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion’.
Despite its disarmingly honest and openhearted style, The Year of Magical Thinking is an emotional rollercoaster of a read.
Not least because, at the time of her husband’s death, Didion’s daughter, Quintana, was in hospital suffering from acute septic shock, so they had to cope with a horrific set of circumstances.1
But, as its title suggests, there’s something mysteriously life-affirming about this powerful memoir.
By the time I had finished it, everything seemed so vivid – I felt more lucid and alive.
James Lee © 2024
Quintana eventually recovered from sepsis, but, shortly after her father’s funeral, had to have emergency brain surgery after a fall. She recovered again, but then, just over a year later, whilst Didion was still promoting The Year of Magical Thinking, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis at the age of just thirty-nine. I haven’t read it yet, but Didion’s memoir about Quintana’s life/death, Blue Nights, was first published in 2011. Joan Didion died on 23rd December 2021.
This book was very important to me when a close friend of mine died. Most of all I think I needed the perspective of someone who wasn't turning to religion to understand death.
A moving tribute to this wonderful book, James. I read it and Blue Nights the year before my father died and I feel that her writing gave me ways of thinking about grief that helped me through that (though nothing prepares you fully).