I’m trying to explain how a book about grief managed to crawl under my skin and stay there long after I closed it. This book didn’t just hit me; it rearranged something inside me. It’s Joan Didion peeling herself raw on the page, letting us witness her grief after losing her husband, John, suddenly while her daughter was in the hospital fighting for her life. And the way she writes it — not in grand, sweeping tragedy, but in fragments, in the small, obsessive thoughts, in the strange rules grief forces you to live by — that’s what stayed with me.
She has this thought that she keeps going round and round: magical thinking. The desperate wish, that were she would only do things a certain way, he would come back. Similar to the occasion when she was not able to dispose of the shoes belonging to John as what would happen should he need them once he returned? That detail floored me. So much weight was in such a small thing, shoes. I was thinking about my personal life and what is in my own house, how something can so readily turn to relics in case something unimaginable occurred.
The thing that is almost intolerable about this book, and still cannot be laid aside, is the clarity of Didion. She is not melodramatic, any pleading with you not to pity her. She simply puts it down with this terseness, this keen exactness of verisimilitude, and in that suppression you can feel the earthquake under her words. It is as though she is putting both hands on the grief, attempting to explore it like a rock but every now and then, it splits and you can view just how pain it inflicts.
There were some times, I tell you, when I laughed bitterly; oh-my-god-I-recognize-this. The manner in which she explains her rituals, how she refuses to relinquish her habits which no longer have any meaning to them, it is ridiculous, but also terribly human. We saw, because we have all had these little superstitions, these deals with the universe? Hers had simply come out of the coarsest kind of place.
After which there were instances when I was just hit in the gut. She particularly, in the hospital scenes with her daughter, Quintana. It is impossible to see the way she balances between raising her dying child and mourning among the loss of her husband but I cannot imagine how she managed to speak. It had brought back to me how brutally no one cares about life, how one loss does not stop to think about another, how in some cases you are drowning and you are supposed to swim anyway.
What stuck with me most of all, however, was not only her sorrow. It was the manner in which she demonstrated how grief distorts time. Entire paragraphs are circular in their movements, lines reoccur, almost like she is revisiting the same memories again and again because she is unable to release them. It was like being in her head, like you are in her kitchen table where she picks up her thought and she drops the thought and picks it up because it is the only way she can still feel like her husband is there.
At the end of reading the book, I was not ready to have some closure on it- and that is the point. Didion does not wrapping her grief in a nice package, does not provide us with a redemption arc, a lesson on how to move on. Instead, she demonstrates what life is like when you are within the storm, when your world has gone off-balanced sheet. And strangely that blamelessness is consoling. Since it informs you that it is fine that your sorrow does not make sense, that it does not conform to the pattern that people want it to.
Reading The Year of Magical Thinking was like being invited into the most personal and painful part of a life of someone, but rather than driving me away, it helped me feel like I was not the only one.
The last three images was gotten from web:
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