The Year of Magical Thinking

“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.”

Didion’s writing reflects the wave effect described in this quotation. She waivers between rationality and the overwhelming effects of grief which cloud her thinking. In one moment, she can be fine and go about her day as normal when she is suddenly triggered and overcome by the “waves, paroxysms, [and] sudden apprehensions” of her grief.

“I needed to be alone so he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.”

The theme The Power and Limitations of ‘Magical Thinking’ is central to the book, as in “magical thinking” certain rituals or actions are believed to exert power over the external world. Didion’s decision to stay alone the night after her husband’s death represents one in a string of manifestations of magical thinking, which will become a habit in the year following his death.

“It was deep into the summer, some months after the night when I needed to be alone so that he could come back, before I recognized that through the winter and spring there had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.”

Didion draws a connection between her use of magical thinking and the literary trope of madness. She connects faith with irrationality, suggesting that grief has plunged her into a state of faith and wishful thinking that is akin to mental illness. In comparing her naïve belief in the power of her own “thoughts and wishes” as being akin to the innocent thinking of children, Didion emphasizes her helplessness in the face of situations she is unable to control.

“Was it about faith or was it about grief? Were faith and grief the same thing?”

Here, Didion connects both concepts of faith and grief. Both, she believes, are rooted in irrationality or the literary trope of madness.

“These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved.”

Grief plunges Didion into an altered state of consciousness, as well as an altered state of being. She finds herself living on a different plane of existence from those around her, unable to be touched or comforted. Her belief in her own “invisibility” also speaks to a type of magical thinking, as she experiences the world as though she could transcend her own physicality, at least metaphorically.

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.”

Didion turns to literature and research to bolster her and help her make sense of her experience. In this chapter, she presents somewhat cold and calculated facts of her daughter’s time in the hospital and her subsequent neurosurgery. Didion waivers between a balance of rationality and a need for control, as exhibited in this chapter, and an irrational connection to faith and magical thinking.

“I had asked. I do not remember getting an answer. It was a period when I asked many questions that did not get answered.”

Didion here recalls her experience at the hospital with Quintana, asking the doctors repeated questions that went unanswered, which mirrors her experience during the entire year. She relies on her research and logical brain to make sense of what is happening around her, but even her well-equipped mind still meets barriers to understanding.

“Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day.”

Because Didion had been so singularly focused on Quintana’s illness, she was not able to mourn the loss of her husband. In this passage, she confronts this truth. The period that she at first believes will be a return to normalcy is transformed into a period of true mourning. In making a distinction between “grief” as passive and “mourning” as active healing, Didion also signals her nascent understanding of the importance of eventually confronting reality in order to move forward.

“I realized that I had never believed in the words I had learned as a child in order to be confirmed as an Episcopalian: I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, amen. I did not believe in the resurrection of the body.”

This statement expresses irony. Didion does not believe in the resurrection of Christ, but she holds to the belief that her husband may one day return. In this way, Didion’s “magical thinking” substitutes traditional religious faith with a belief that her husband can be restored to her in the earthly realm.

“The similarity of this broken braided belt to the one I found in the plastic bag I was given at New York Hospital does not escape my attention. Nor does the fact that I was still thinking I broke it, I did it, I am responsible.”

After her husband’s passing, Didion is caught between guilt and anger. She feels somehow responsible for her husband’s death. She wonders if she had done something different—made a joke at the right time, for instance—her husband would not have died. She also feels angry with him for leaving her behind. The symbolism of the broken braided belt also speaks to the importance of clothing in the memoir as a whole.

“'Goddamn,’ John said to me when he closed the book. ‘Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you.’ I remember tears coming to my eyes. I feel them now. In retrospect this had been my omen, my message, the early snowfall, the birthday present no one else could give me. He had twenty-five nights left to live.”

Didion speaks often about the foreshadowing of death and her search for symbols after Dunne’s passing. In this passage she recalls one such moment, suggesting that after Dunne finished reading aloud from one of Didion’s books, it was one of those signs.

“There came a time in the summer when I began feeling fragile, unstable.”

In this passage, Didion explores how grief destroys her cognition and undermines her usually rational, controlled self. As she attempts to move on with her life, she recognizes that her own mind is betraying her at every turn. She does not feel ready to meet the world.

“Instead I think about people I know who have lost a husband or wife or child. I think particularly about how these people looked when I saw them unexpectedly—on the street, say, or entering a room—during the year or so after the death. What struck me in each instance was how exposed they seemed, how raw.”

The Year of Magical Thinking lends itself to an intimate study of the grieving process. Didion asserts that grief is a form of mental illness that can also alter the physiological state of someone’s being, leaving a person looking “exposed” and “raw” through the ravages of their grief. In recalling how she has seen others mirror the grief she herself is now experiencing, Didion also suggests that there is an unspoken form of community that binds the bereaved together even in their separate states of mourning.

“Even as I waited in the security line, even as I picked up releases in the press center, even as I located my seat and stood for the national anthem, even as I bought a hamburger at the McDonald’s in the Fleet Center and sat on the lowest step of a barricaded stairway to eat it, the details sprang back. ‘In another world’ was the phrase that would not leave my mind. Quintana sitting in the sunlight in the living room having her hair braided.”

This passage contributes to the theme of The Interconnected Nature of Memory. Didion believes that she will be safe from the vortex of memory while in Boston, but the slightest things trigger her. Even as Didion seeks to create new memories that have nothing to do with either her husband or her daughter, she still keeps recalling moments from her past with both of them.

“We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn’t we do this, didn’t we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.”

Didion believes that Dunne knew he was about to die. She sees signs and foreshadowing in many of her interactions with Dunne, as well as in his writing. She asserts that this is common for those grieving and for those about to die. In searching for these signs, she also rediscovers things about her husband, such as in this passage when she realizes what he meant in wishing they could have more fun and cherish their remaining time together.

“’Fritter away’ was a definition in the crossword that morning. The word it defined was five letters, ‘waste.’ Was that what we had done? Was that what he thought we had done? Why didn’t l listen when he said we weren’t having any fun? Why didn’t I move to change our life?”

This quotation provides an example of how minute details can trigger memory and irrational thought. Didion completes a crossword and spirals into blame and guilt over her husband’s death. This passage is also an example of Didion’s struggle with trying to ascertain whether or not she could or should have done something differently in the time leading up to her husband’s death.

“We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be ‘healing.’ A certain forward movement will prevail.”

This quotation contributes to the theme of Grief and the Literary Trope of Madness. Didion is pulled between rational thought and the irrational belief that her husband might someday return, thereby confronting the reality that grief has not affected her the way she always imagined it would. This passage is an example of how Didion must confront the loss of control grief has brought to her life.

“Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

All the themes in Didion’s memoir inform her search for meaning and her discovery of meaninglessness. Here, she suggests that grief is at the other end of the spectrum of meaning. It leaves its victims armed with nothing with which to make sense of their experience.

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

Throughout her memoir, Didion addresses the concept of self-pity. She claims that those grieving do everything they can to avoid being accused of it. However, she asserts that self-pity is at the core of grief: It is rooted in the feeling of loss and feeling abandoned, leaving one to mourn not only the deceased but also the loss of one’s former identity and way of life.

“In my rational mind I knew that. I was not however operating from my rational mind.”

Didion can see that her thoughts are not reasonable. She knows, for example, that relief for the death of Julia Child because it means her deceased husband can dine with the chef is not indicative of her normally rational brain. However, she is still unable to exert power over this irrational side of herself.

“On such occasions I hear myself trying to make an effort and failing. I notice that I get up from dinner too abruptly. I also notice that I do not have the resilience I had a year ago.”

Didion suggests that a modern view of grief denies the reality of the experience. In the past, grief was a lengthy process. Those left behind were expected to mourn. Modern grief means the denial of emotion, and Didion finds herself unable to comply, struggling even more with her loss as time goes on.

“Now the Broken Man was in the ICU at Beth Israel North waiting for her and now the Broken Man was in this taxi waiting for her father. Even at three or four she had recognized that when it came to the Broken Man she could rely only on her own efforts. If the Broken Man comes I’ll hang onto the fence and won’t let him take me. She hung onto the fence. Her father did not.”

A central part of the grieving process is anger. Didion deals with her anger toward Dunne for having left her, as well as her anger over her daughter’s illness. In this passage, the “Broken Man” represents the threat of death—her daughter appears able to evade death successfully, while Dunne was forced to succumb. In either case, there is nothing that Didion can or could do to intervene and save her loved one.

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”

The need to let go is outlined in the final chapters of the memoir. Although Didion does not yet feel fully equipped to completely let go, she begins this process, accepting that in order to keep living her own life she needs to accept the finality of death.