The Year of Magical Thinking

A lot of people have been touched by Joan Didion's award-winning memoir of the year she coped not just with her husband's sudden death from massive cardiac arrest but her daughter's hospitalization for a flu that became a life threatening systemic infection. Though riveted by the author's minute self-observation of her precarious and shift states of mind, I also found it excruciating. Didion describes herself as a person unafraid of facts, who likes to be "right" and now finds herself in a situation where she is fibbing to herself. And she's courageously aware of her own coping mechanisms and their craziness, while she's invested in believing them. Of course that is the stance of many of Didion's fictional heroines, who pride themselves on not succumbing to self-deception. In Play it as it Lays, the fictional heroine's gimlet eye is deeply ironic and as seductive as Chandler's Marlowe. In The Year of Magical Thinking, that character has grown up and is analyzing and undergoing the experience of grief, which awakens new compassion for the fragility of our human psyche. She also paints well not just the loss of an intimate partner, but her dislocation in her world and in life. My only beef with this book, is how little we know about her daughter and her daughter's life. Much of the book is taken up with her feelings of helplessness and necessity as she works to keep her daughter alive from one crisis to another. In the end, as the daughter is finally able to resume some of her life, and Didion must find a way to rebuild her own, we root for both. Unfortunately, we have no portrait of this daughter, this other, as we do for her husband. And that's a pity in an otherwise very knowing book about the desolation of family and the self--two landscapes that profoundly intersect.