The Year of Magical Thinking

Title: The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
Pub Date: 2006
Pages: 227
Genre: Memoir, Death & Dying

Do you know who Joan Didion is? I didn't. But I read her memoir. I also, admittedly, didn't know it was a memoir when I started to read it. How might that have occurred, you might ask. Well, you see, I saw it pop up on bookmooch (and my list has grown so much that I've often forgotten why I've chosen some of the books) and it quickly made its way into my home and hand.

Within the first couple of pages I realized that this was a memoir of survival. While Joan Didion's daughter is in ICU in a comma, her husband (John Dunne) of forty years dies from a massive cardiac arrest. In her memoir she relives that night over and over again believing in the "if only's" to bring back the love of her life. She refers to the year that follows as her year of magical thinking. ("I needed to be alone so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.")

This memoir is raw, thorough, empowering, and REAL. Didion is a true artist capturing both the emotional repetition of conversations she shared with Dunne over mundane life and the sterile research a mourner dissects while looking through medical records or even an Emily Post article on the proper way to grieve.

Grief is this sacred experience isn't it? No one is ever lucky enough to not experience it and yet, even though it is universal and we might go through a similar process, the experience is unique to each individual. And the experience is different for each person we lose.

"People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of the extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who ears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off."

Mrs. Didion also pointed out that we often hide our grief. That at some point in time, mourning became shunned in our society because it only reenforced the idea of infallibility, of mortality. She cites Geoffrey Gorer who said in Death, Grief, and Mourning that "Death, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden."

I don't know how this ended up on my bookmooch list. I don't think that I ever would have picked it up if it hadn't. Thankfully, I did, so I don't have to wonder about reading what-if's. This is a book that will stay with me forever. One that will be cherished. One that will be read again when I lose someone dear to me. One that I will recommend when I know someone who has lost someone dear.