Articles

1. The Year of Magical Thinking

I’m risking a grandiose generalization when I say that a great love for literature, for reading literature, is borne of a loneliness of some kind. It is a corpus of comfort, a forever waiting shoulder to cry on. When circumstances are irresolvable, reaching the last chapter of a book is a tidy knot of reassurance in the day.

Joan Didion does the same when her husband and writing companion of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, passes away suddenly in December 2003. Her first articulation of grief is in 2004 but it was still a long way from the realization of the book under review “The Year of Magical Thinking”.

She notes in the text that “In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.” She does that, in a manner that combines a personal narration with an electric study of the phenomenon that affects everyone at some point in their lives - grief.

Grief stands in contrast to sadness and even loneliness. “Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of ‘waves’.”

The book is a documentation of those ‘waves’ of grief, in the aftermath of John’s death even while her daughter Quintana lies in the ICU with her own future hanging in balance. The title refers to the year after John’s death which she spent in hoping for his return. Anyone who at this point, thinks the book will be a morbid read, heavily plied with tones of emotional collapse is obviously not familiar with Didion’s style of writing.

I have to admit that I am biased. Joan Didion and Carol Shields are my favorite female authors this side of the century. Both are very different stylistically but equally incisive. While Shields brings the sublime into the mundane for me, Didion’s forte is the personal-essay form of writing (which I hope is not a dying art). Didion is not an exhibitionist for the sake of a personal narration. Her minimalist, spare style of writing removes the book from a melancholy genre and takes it to the level of a love story if anything. She revisits the houses they have bought, the drives, meals and fights they shared to highlight her present views of the differences and compatibilities between the couple.

The anatomy of grief has rarely been so well handled. Didion has compartmentalized it admirably as she follows the yellow brick road of information about bereavement. It is almost as if understanding the nuances of how grief happens, will lessen her pain. There are cultural observations on death amongst many other psychiatric readings of how grief is typically handled. One of them notes how in Western countries at present, death is a phenomenon that has to be effaced as soon as possible. It’s a factor of shame to mourn publicly, (a stark contrast to Pakistan’s culture and rituals of death) because it flied on the face of the ethical duty of today i.e. to live life to the fullest.

This is probably the culture Didion opposes and subverts in the form of this book, a form of expression that is as public as one get with grief. It is a hands-on manual to grief. There is no ginger, hesitant treatment of an event that has left her subtracted. (As an aside, surprisingly for Pakistan where display of public reaction to death is valued, there seems to be little emphasis on the effects on individual psyche.) Didion speaks on self-pity and how in this era, you can no longer say one person leaves your world empty because that would be “construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.” It seems however, that is exactly what needs to be done to move with the change.

As an affirmation of a life after a death, I think Didion’s approach works. The book is the realization of that pain in a calmly intelligent portrayal of grief that ends on anything but a futile note.


2. Mongol Expansion