Review: Memoirs try to explain human mortality

Joan Didion has had an extraordinarily difficult past two years.
While she was preparing dinner on Dec. 30, 2003, her husband of 40
years, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a heart attack that took his
life almost instantly.

On top of her husband’s death, the couple had been
returning from a hospital visit to see their only daughter,
Quintana Roo Dunne Michaels, who was unconscious after a Christmas
day check-in for a severe case of the flu turned into pneumonia and
septic shock.

Two months after her eventual release from the hospital, she
experienced a massive hepatoma in her brain and had to undergo
emergency neurosurgery at UCLA.

But Didion is a writer, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker
and the New York Review of Books, and in this time of tragedy and
its ensuing confusion, frustration, and mental delusions, she
turned to her craft as a way to grasp of the events unraveling
around her.

The result is a memoir on mourning, “The Year of Magical
Thinking,” an honest and emotionally raw presentation that
brings the subject of grief into public dialogue and exposes a
prominent American literary figure struggling to hang on to her
sanity and learn to live on her own once more.

Didion’s 2004 memoir is a non-linear narrative. It takes
the reader in continual circles ““ one moment Didion is
writing shortly after her husband’s death, then she is in
December 2003, then something triggers her to dwell on a memory of
her and Dunne from the 1970s.

But Didion’s repeatedly broken chronology serves to
illustrate a woman who is simultaneously living in the present and
living in her memories, desperately attempting to keep Dunne alive
in her mind.

She officially states dates repeatedly and constructs crude
outlines that objectively order the events surrounding her
husband’s death and daughter’s hospitalization. Yet her
insistence on matter-of-factly organizing those ultimately
life-changing moments suggests she is grasping for a way to control
what has happened to her husband and to herself emotionally in his
physical absence.

The magical thinking to which Didion refers in the title of the
book is her admittedly irrational personal belief that her husband
would and could come back if she did or did not do certain
things.

In the self-analytical and honest style that characterized her
socio-personal essays of the 1960s and 1970s, Didion confesses and
then deconstructs her thoughts.

She recalls her adamant opposition to giving away her
husband’s shoes, writing, “I could not give away the
rest of his shoes/I stood there for a moment, then realized why: He
would need his shoes if he was to return.”

And while she has buried her tears and emotions deep inside of
her and appropriated a rational, analytical way of making sense of
everything, her memoir illustrates that while she may appear normal
““ embodying the idea of the “cool customer” in
the hospital when Dunne was pronounced dead ““ her attempt to
give others a glimpse into understanding grief is anything but
rational and sane.

In that sense, “Year” becomes both a personal memoir
and a social commentary on mourning in today’s culture.

Although it is not a book characterized by passionate outbursts,
Didion no doubt must have spent hours crying while she wrote it. It
is a heavy work by the nature of its subject matter, one that is
hard to take in long sittings.

Even the sweet, nostalgic memories of her and Dunne’s
relationship are tainted by the fact that these memories are
debilitating Didion and keeping her from moving forward.

Didion sounds exhausted and fragile, and “Year” will
likely leave the reader feeling emotionally beaten by the end,
though not necessarily hopeless.

She delivers a powerful and beautiful portrait that chronicles
not only her experience with mourning, but her marriage to Dunne,
as she comes to understand the notion of human mortality.

““ Jess Rodgers