Finding company for The Year of Magical Thinking

I moved to Colorado in January 2017 with only possessions I could fit in my car. Housing is tough on the state’s Western Slope. Even before the affordable housing crisis dominated the country, finding a place to live in a resort town on a newspaper editor’s salary was going to be a challenge. So I packed a limited wardrobe, yoga essentials, my two cats and 12 books to accompany me during an undetermined period of living on the basement level of my best friend’s condo.

One of those books was the classic grief memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.” It had been on my to-read shelf for a while, but I couldn’t tell you why it made the cut out of hundreds of options. Sometimes books come to you at the right time, I suppose. A week after I arrived in Colorado, my sister died of alcoholism.

It was time to read Joan Didion.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” is one of the first books people suggest to someone in mourning, at least in my experience. Perhaps that says something about my demographics—white, upper middle class, female, writer, academically motivated. And I’ll confess, it isn’t my favorite grief book, not by a long shot.

But there are also good reasons for this recommendation. After the sudden death of her husband, John Dunne, Didion is disoriented and grasping for reality. When her literary agent calls The New York Times’ chief obituary writer to report John’s death, Didion panicks. Friends in Los Angeles couldn’t learn about John’s death in The New York Times!

“I found myself wondering, with no sense of illogic, if it had also happened in Los Angeles,” she wrote. “I was trying to work out what time it had been when he died and whether it was that time yet in Los Angeles. (Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?)”

Time can become elastic during times of crisis. When I learned my sister had died, minutes crawled as we tried to figure out why she hadn’t shown up for work that day. After a friend confirmed Cristin’s death, time snapped back into place like a rubber band. Its recoil was punishing. During time’s slow expansion, I carried a sense of dread but hoped against hope that my sister was well. Once I knew she was not, a strange new reality demanded my attention.

Didion also wrestles with the truth of her husband’s death. She requires solitude that first night, even though her agent offers to stay over, because Didion isn’t ready to accept John was gone. If she’s alone, she can cling to hope.

Though it covers the first year following Dunne’s death, which coincides with their daughter’s significant illness, “The Year of Magical Thinking” is nonlinear. The book skips through the couple’s relationship, reflecting on their early days together and the years they spent working from the same apartment. Their intimacy and the lack left by his death renders Didion a wanderer who struggles to complete an essay without her husband, her first editor, on hand for review.

Didion’s ruminations often pull focus from the narrative. That sometimes makes for difficult reading; we’re reflecting on one person’s pain, sometimes meandering through these difficult observations.

But the central conceit resonates. Maybe “The Year of Magical Thinking” doesn’t grab me because it can be so painful to return to grief’s disorientation. Perhaps my mind is protecting me and the progress I’ve made over the past nine years.

Like Didion, I struggled to accept my sister’s death. I saw her over Christmas weeks before. She attended my farewell party before I set out on the cross-country road trip to Colorado. We said goodbye outside a mall hamburger shop, and I don’t think either of us would have guessed that meal would be our final hour together.

Didion was an early guide on my journey to understand grief through literature—and it’s an impulse she understood. “In time of trouble, I had been taught since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control,” she wrote. Didion found relevant literature tough to find when she mourned her husband’s death in the early 2000s. Though her book was one of the first I turned to in my own journey, it’s one of dozens in which I’ve found consolation. Together, they’ve formed a support group that reminds me that my pain was real. My confusion was understandable. And the hole left by my sister’s absence is a scar that keeps her present in my life.

What resonated with you from The Year of Magical Thinking? Did you find any pieces helpful? How have you grounded yourself during times of grief? Have you read Blue Nights, the book Didion wrote after her daughter’s death? Should I? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

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