Review: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.” 

In this work, Joan Didion recounts her grieving process in the year following her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack. Reflecting on those first few months, she realizes that many of her decisions and ways of thinking were not based on reality, like sleeping alone in her apartment that first night “so that he could come back”, or arguing against a tracheostomy for her critically ill daughter, so that “she could be fine in the morning, ready to eat, talk, go home.” These moments give the book its title: A Year of Magical Thinking.

Grief does not always take the same path. Magical thinking is not a part of every journey. Many of the particulars of Didion’s experiences — the casualness with which she considers buying a house in Hawaii or flying to Paris or eating out every night — will not reflect most people’s realities. But most paths cross some of the same trail markers. Didion shares the cycles her mind looped through in that first year of her grief: rumination over the last few months with her husband, fixation over the last moments of his life and trying to piece together what happened and what he experienced, the haze of the first few weeks or months spliced with a few laser sharp memories. 

Didion weaves her own recollections with quotes and passages from others struggling with grief, emphasizing how common an experience it is, for all it is devastating. Like me, she is the type of person to relentlessly research a topic, and so she also bolsters her narrative with things she gleaned from medical and psychological journals. While virtually everyone will experience loss at some point in their lives, it is nevertheless an intense and often lonely emotion to go through. These writing choices help place her very personal account in the broader context of human experience.

Grief confronts Didion with aspects of herself she had not previously considered, such as her need to always be right (“For once in your life just let it go.”), or her positive thinking (“I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation.”). In mourning her husband, she also mourns her own former self: “When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer.” The version of herself her husband saw is forever gone.

Didion’s account is also a tribute to her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and to their relationship. As it should be—what is so painful about grief is the end of a specific relationship, the loss of that shared experience. Exploring that emotion requires exploring what he meant to her. Both worked from home, and Didion speculates that it was because they were “unusually dependent on one another” that her grief was “pathological.” Prolonged grief disorder, as it is now known, was added to the DSM two decades after this book was written.

Didion struggles to let go of her husband: to acknowledge “that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day”, feels like “so distinct a betrayal.” Avoiding that acknowledgement becomes a way of keeping him alive. Her grief comes and goes in waves, once catching her by surprise in the middle of a story. She calls on his voice inside her head to make the deadline (“You’re a professional. Finish the piece.”). Eventually, she does make it through to the other side.

For those looking for advice on how to move on from loss, Didion offers no clear answers. Such ready-made solutions may help little anyways: knowing that one needs to let go “does not make it any easier to let go.” She describes grief as “passive”; in contrast, “mourning, the act of dealing with grief, [requires] attention.” The writing of this book was undoubtedly part of this mourning process: the active examination of her emotions and thought patterns and her search for their meaning must have helped her process them and recognize herself in her new identity as a widow. Writing is so much a part of how Didion relates with the world that this approach must have seemed natural. Other writers have sought this method too — I was reminded of Ti Amo, a similarly intensely personal reflection on grieving a husband based on the author’s own experience. Non-writers will have to find their own path. But if this book fails as an instruction manual, it does perhaps provide solace that this particular pain is shared, an opportunity to see the self in another person.

And for non-grievers? Didion warns us that conceptually being aware of grief and its inevitability does little to prepare you for it. This book is therefore no vaccine. Still, it remains compelling as a study of how a person examines their own emotions and finds rational explanations for seemingly irrational thoughts — magical thinking.