Julie Ehlers's Reviews > The Year of Magical Thinking

I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to write about this book. This is, without a doubt, the perfect book about having your husband die suddenly of a massive heart attack while your daughter is in the hospital in a coma, about to begin her own death-defying medical struggle (one she eventually loses, although that’s outside the scope of this particular book). I thought this memoir was so perfect that it’s hard for me to understand any of the criticisms of it. Are the critics saying there’s only one way to grieve, and Joan Didion is doing it wrong? Or that there’s only one way to write about grieving, and Joan Didion is doing that wrong?

If you’ve ever grieved the loss of anyone, I don’t see how you can hold either of these opinions. Grief does not follow some straight line, where you’re devastated and then day by day you’re less devastated, until one day you’re fine. As this book makes clear, grief is sporadic and unpredictable. It ebbs and flows. There’s nothing logical about it, and trying to impose logic isn't going to help you at all. And so, Joan Didion takes a cab home from the hospital after the death of her husband John, and her first thought is that she really needs to discuss the situation with John. She initially doesn’t want people to know about his death, because it might ruin his chances of coming back. With both her daughter and her husband, she goes over situations again and again, as if by doing so she could somehow change what has already happened. She moves back to Los Angeles to be with her daughter during her latest hospital stay, but finds the streets so full of memories that she must devise careful routes that don’t lead her past any troubling locations that might leave her useless for the rest of the day. She cries to her doctor that she “just can’t see the upside” to the situation. If all of this sounds grim, it is. Of course it is. But perfect.

There seem to be two main criticisms of this book. One is that Joan Didion is ice-cold, standoffish, and unfeeling. She certainly seems this way sometimes: At the time of her husband’s death, the social worker assigned to her calls her “a pretty cool customer.” Significantly, though, Joan wonders what an “uncool customer” would be allowed to do: “Break down? Require sedation? Scream?” Joan wonders this not with judgment, but clearly with a kind of envy: Just because she doesn’t do these things doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to.

Fittingly, then, the other criticism I’ve seen is that Joan is too self-pitying. Joan addresses this in the book as well. We abhor self-pity in our culture, but, as she points out, if you’ve been through a traumatic experience over which you have no control, self-pity is a perfectly normal response. And it is! So I guess the truth is, in this book, Joan Didion is both self-pitying and a “cool customer.” In this book you see quite clearly the struggle of someone who’s kept things under control for years and now finds, late in life, that nothing at all is under her control. How it could be written any other way is beyond me.