Notes on The Year of Magical Thinking

We tell ourselves stories in order to live

There is something quite absurd about life.

We are all encouraged, and rightly so, to make the most of life but, we do so in the face of the knowledge it will all end one day. And to run salt in our faces none of us know when that day will come.

There are generally two approaches to this absurdity—embrace or ignore.

This article is my notes and commentary on the American writer Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking.

If you know nothing about Didion, her life, and this book, please understand there are spoilers ahead. I'd suggest reading the book first. But if you know of her and her life but have not read the book, this article might make the book even more enjoyable to read.

On the surface, one might say that *The Year of Magical Thinking* is a meditation on death and grief. While the book covers these topics in a way only Didion can, I believe, the real narrative is of identity. It is a fascinating look candid in its details you are left stunned at the strength of her spirit.

Although of the two camps of embrace or ignore, Didion falls squarely in the ignore camp.

Didion opens the book with four lines that frame things to come. Short in execution; and long in exposition, these four lines unfold over the course of the next two hundred and something pages.

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.¹

The first time I read these four lines, I found them to be a little odd. Perhaps even a little off. I did not like them. They felt unpolished. Clunky even. But I've come to love them. To see the beauty in their oddness. The clunkiness reminds me of what it's like to think in the moments after losing someone close. That is to say, you do not think straight. Everything is wrong. It is as if you are walking on slanted ground. Still, you try. But in the trying everything comes out weird.

Didion then sets the scene for what's to come.

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, 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.²

Before taking us back to the foundations of her worldview.

I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.³

A trait of the human condition is to find meaning in life through the things that give us pleasure. We then rationalize this meaning to make sense of everything from this position. For Didion this was structure.

This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.⁴

By setting up meaning only in the things we love and can understand, we are locking ourselves out of the possibility of learning from things we cannot "penetrate" as Didion puts it.

This can leave us open to all sorts of unseen problems. As Didion writes:

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.⁵

Grief will come to all but the sociopath. This is a certainty as sure as death itself. The only thing we get to control is, "the question of self-pity."

In this, we see Didion's reflex to find meaning in structure, and her insistence to control.

I see now that my insistence on spending that first night alone was more complicated than it seemed, a primitive instinct. Of course, I knew John was dead. Of course, I had already delivered the definitive news to his brother and to my brother and to Quintana's husband. The New York Times knew. The Los Angeles Times knew. Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. I needed to be alone so that he could come back.⁶

But when Didion says, “I needed to be alone so that he could come back.”

This is not about control or structure. Rather it's the first step in the process of healing. A "primitive instinct" that knows best.

I understand this mindset from my own experience. For years after the death of my Tibetan teacher, a monk who had a deep influence on my life, I would often wake from sleep in the belief he was still alive. Sometimes this would be a result of a particularly vivid dream and other times not—I simply felt that he was still with us. And by "with us" I do not mean, in spirit. I mean alive and kicking in the real sense. There were even times when this happened so strongly that I would have to shake myself from the idea he was alive by remembering the actual funeral.

The universality of these types of responses is well known. The reason for them, less so.

Didion suggests dependency as the cause:

Unusual dependency (is that a way of saying "marriage"? "husband and wife"? "mother and child"?) is not the only situation in which complicated or pathological grief can occur.⁷

At first reading, "unusual dependency" of various types does appear to be the likely cause of "complicated or pathological grief." As Didion believes the core of the problem is dependency she never quite sees pass this but does get close. And we can see this in the following passage:

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 of for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we no longer are. As we will one day not be at all.⁸

We "mourn ourselves" because something of ourselves has been lost. This speaks to the idea of identity. So while dependency may play a role, it is not the key to what's going on with grief.

It may seem as if I am splitting hairs, and rather coldly. I am not. Grief is not a sign of love. Love is a sign of love. Grief is real though. Grief is something we need to process. Grief is related to dependency. But that is not the full picture. If we can understand the full picture well everything becomes easier.

Side note: Many people reference Buddhism when they use the term detachment. "*Detachment is good, look the Buddhists do it.*" This is a misunderstanding. The better word is *non-attachment*. Detachment suggests a kind of distance and gives off a sense of not caring. Non-attachment on the other hand does not. It's a subtle distinction but an important one. For you can be dependent on another human being, care deeply about them, and not be attached. And I would claim the relationship will be better for it. How? Identity. That is to say, if your sense of self is bound to another when you lose the other, you lose a part of yourself. Dependency is not the issue, identity is. For if you are a "stand-alone-whole-self" then you get to have everything good from a relationship without any of the downsides.

Of course, this is extremely hard to do in practice. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Indeed, I would suggest by simply understanding the process we live better. And not just in relationship with others. This can equally apply to our relationship with ourselves. For instance, towards the final hours of his life, Didion reports on what her husband John said coming home from seeing their daughter in hospital.

Everything he had done, he said, was worthless.⁹

Again, this is a question of identity going to the heart of the absurdity of life—why do anything at all if all you do is washed away by death? This is something I have struggled with myself. But it is only a problem if the value of what we do is extracted by oneself. And this is never the case even when we feel it bones deep! In some strange way, it gives us the permission to not take responsibility for how things turn out.

Towards the end of the book, Didion picks up on a similar thread related to identity that carves deep into her psyche and comes up with this insight:

Not only did I not believe that "bad luck" had killed John and Quintana but in fact I believed precisely the opposite: I believed that I should have been able to prevent whatever happened. Only after the dream about being left on the tarmac at the Santa Monica Airport did it occur to me that there was a level on which I was not actually holding myself responsible, a significant difference but one that took me anywhere I needed to be. For once in your life just let it go.¹⁰

Her honesty is striking. It's worth noting that the last sentence is her emphasis. She sees the irony but not where it's pointing. So her insight into not taking responsibility is not a lack of wisdom but rather a strategy. A strategy for structure and control. For instance, when speaking on how she dealt with the stress Didion says:

For as long as I was thinking about the summer of 1955 I would not be thinking about John or Quintana.¹¹

This insistence on brushing things aside is a stoic reflex gone wrong. It is a means of coping not processing. Kicking the can down the road until one is ready to process is smart but, only if you know it's a strategy.

She found meaning in structure. We all find meaning in structure. Life, after all, and in some real sense, is the structuring of consciousness into meaningful embodiment.

In the end, this wonderfully intimate book is Didion making sense of what happened. Objectively what happened would have floored most people. Her resilience shines through. You can imagine this would harden many but Didion never falls for "the question of self-pity."

Didion passed away in 2021 at the age of 87 but she lives on in her books.

I will the last words to her:

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.¹²

1. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion. p.1

2. ibid p.7

3. ibid p.7

4. ibid p.8

5. ibid p.28

6. ibid p.33

7. ibid p.54

8. ibid p.198

9. ibid p.81

10. ibid p.173

11. ibid p.179

12. ibid p.188