Joan Didion’s Memoir
Just when we thought book reviews could not influence opinion, Robert Pinsky does with his review of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The memoir is framed by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “o the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall..” Didion’s title suggests experiences both harrowing and final, the illness of her daughter, the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Even before reading the body of the text, a powerful sense of foreboding fills the heart and soul. The sudden death of a loved one juxtaposed with the extreme anxiety of a parent for a child seems like an exceptionally cruel circumstance, as though her resources weren’t stretched thin enough, her husband dies at the dinner table with one hand raised, a gesture mistaken for the beginning of a joke.
The book is not written as a response to cruel fate or a maudlin look at me tale of prepackaged woe. It is a portrait of an artist enduring the worst of times, a studied and measured analysis of the language used in the multi-sided transactions of crisis, death, the business of illness, survival, and the terms of surrender to grief. Didion describes how she tries to deal with death and fear, her magical thinking, and the complexity of social devices we use to manage grief. Hard, sweet wisdom in the words of another poet. In this case, the phrase seems like understatement.