Comfort
reading
As
usual there are three stages in getting to read this book: wanting
to, acquiring, and actually beginning. I wanted to read it when
it was published, partly because I’d heard of the author
but didion’t know much about her, and partly because I loved
the way the cover of the hardback expressed the subject of the
book - Didion’s grief over the sudden death of her husband
John Gregory Dunne - so cleverly and movingly.
But I didn’t buy it until last year, when
the less beautiful paperback was on sale for half price in a local
bookshop’s closing down sale. And there it sat on my shelves
until the book came back into the limelight recently, with its
theatrical production in London as a monologue starring Vanessa
Redgrave. Depressing really to think how many factors must coalesce
just to get me to read one book. How many others are going to
the wall just because Vanessa Redgrave hasn’t got her finger
out?
Didion tells us:
This is my attempt to make sense of the period
that followed [John's death], weeks and then months that cut
loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness,
about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about
marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways
in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends,
about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. As a writer,
even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published,
I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the
rhythms of the words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique
for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind
an increasingly impenetrable polish.
There is no impenetrable polish in The Year
of Magical Thinking, which often seems not so much an investigation
of grief as an expression of it. Didion wrote it in the months
which ended the first year of her life without Dunne, when the
wound was still open. In the course of the book, Didion goes through
several of the known stages of grief, beginning with denial: she
throws out Dunne’s clothes but keeps his shoes because “he
would need shoes if he was to return.” When she is given
his personal possessions by the hospital, she organises the banknotes
in the wallet in with her own, in order of denomination: “I
remember thinking as I did this that he would see that I was handling
things.”
There’s a sense that we are spying on someone
vulnerable: Didion’s intelligence and the fact that she
chose to write and publish the book do not cloud the clear feeling
that even as the book ends, this is a woman who is far from through
with the grieving process. Near the end she acknowledges this:
“the craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its
place. I look for resolution and find none.” Indeed she
finds that she does not want to enter a recovery process, because:
my image of John at the instant of his death
will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something
that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John
alive, will become more remote, even ‘mudgy’, softened,
transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him.
In that sense, the book is an attempt to cheat this
softening of the edges of memory, to fix in place forever the
bright unignorable moments from his sudden silence as Didion was
making dinner (”John was talking, then he wasn’t”)
through to the dash to hospital by ambulance, where two people
go in and one person comes out.
There is a complicating factor in all this, which
is that at the time Dunne died and Didion was beginning to grieve,
their adopted - only - daughter, Quintana, was in a coma in hospital.
(On the night of Dunne’s death they had just returned from
visiting her.) Didion writes a lot - too much - about Quintana’s
illness through the course of the book, and these seem like a
distraction. Then I learned that, after the book was completed
but a few weeks before it was published, Quintana died also. The
obsessive recounting of her illness now seems like the sort of
foreshadowing which she discusses in Dunne’s case: she interprets
various innocuous comments made by him in the days before his
death as intimations of mortality on his part. Again these are
presented straight-faced, and it’s hard to know whether
Didion is knowingly acknowledging her own grief-stricken blindness,
or just in a muddle in the middle of it.
One quote on the cover of the book suggests that
it will “maybe comfort anyone who has lost forever the one
they loved.” I doubt that, but it may provide understanding
to those, like me, who have been lucky enough not to undergo -
yet - even the ‘normal’ grief of losing parents, let
alone a partner or a child. The Year of Magical Thinking cannot
necessarily help that process, but it can warn the unwary up-front
of the sort of ‘temporary madness’ that can arise,
and that can be endured.
Curiously, what the book left me with most was a
desire to read not only some of Didion’s other books, but
also Dunne’s novels: both their books are quoted in excerpts
throughout The Year of Magical Thinking, as it becomes
as much a memoir of two writers’ lives together as it does
of the survival of one. Titles like Playland were familiar
to me already, and now I want to know more. And what greater purpose
could this book serve than to enable Dunne - to enable any writer
- to live again in the minds of others, who read his books long
after his death?
John
Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
