I have just finished Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I bought the book because although its subject is tragic—Didion’s husband’s death and daughter’s fatal illness—the review in the New York Times by Robert Pinsky assured me that it was “not a downer.”

Technically Pinsky was correct. But he was also right in saying that “the material is literally terrible.” The Year of Magical Thinking has to be one of the most soul-shattering personal essays ever written, describing a grief that I have not known and yet can now somehow partially imagine.

Take this passage as an exmple, Didion’s description of the way a recently bereaved person looks:

The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. 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.

She continues:

I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, The Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them. On the night John died we were thirty-one days short of our fortieth anniversary. You will have by now divined that the “hard sweet wisdom” in the last two lines of “Rose Aylmer” was lost on me.
I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted him back.

On more than a couple of occasions, Didion’s description of mental and emotional anguish was enough to make me pause for a few seconds before continuing. However great the writer, the bravery involved in writing a book like this is immense. How do you stay true to your husband and daughter? How do you stay true to yourself and to your reader when all of these feelings are still so raw (Didion completed the book a little over a year to the day since her husband died)?

The Year of Magical Thinking is brilliantly, honestly executed; a brave, public mourning for the sudden loss of a family.

Links for today:
Rocketboom reports on the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.
Seymour Hersh says the US plans to rely more heavily on air power in Iraq.