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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Memoir of grief – the sudden death of Didion’s husband of forty years while their daughter was catastrophically sick.

Don’t mind me, I’m just going to get all meta up in my meta.

Because two contradictory responses here. On the one hand, I really dug this book – particularly the first half – because it was so consciously an exercise in writing something down because that’s the only way it gets to be real. I, um, let’s just say I get that. I also get Didion’s intellectualized coping mechanisms to a scary degree: in grief, she read poetry and medical journals, and the only difference between us is that she to E. E. Cummings whereas I was stuck on Roethke for months.

On the other hand, I found this book increasingly alienating as it went along, and it was all about Didion’s vast wealth/status privilege. It’s not that I wanted her to edit out all the references to famous friends and gratuitous expenditures; she was just telling it how it was. It’s that it bothered me anyway, even though it clearly wasn’t meant to be namedropping or privilege porn. Displaying your privilege isn’t necessarily the same thing as failing to check it, but it felt the same to me here.

The point being, these two responses -- like me and not like me -- had an enormous bipolar impact on my enjoyment of the book. I mean, I knew that, right, but it’s a little disconcerting to watch it happening in my head. Processing like this is disturbing because it implies a systematic lack of access to a huge range of experience based purely on lack of personal analogy. Grief is universal, and yet, if you’re not like me . . . well, then it’s a different book, a lesser book, apparently.

You guys, I cannot describe the enormous restraint which is currently damming the extensive ramble complete with citations to cognitive neuroscience papers on homophily and mirror neurons and social sorting. Let’s just put it this way: our lizard brains don’t like diversity and they do like people just like us for friends and partners. It’s really fucking depressing, to be honest.

Uh. The book is pretty good, actually, if you're in the mood for that sort of thing.

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