year magical thinking joan didion quotes

While Didion’s prose didn’t necessarily feel sad, she made me feel emotions I hadn’t in reading other memoirs. When my dad suffered a stroke only a few years after my brain surgery to remove a tumor from my temporal lobe I wondered if it was my fault for not being thankful enough for surviving. I also practiced this outcome-based imagination after I learned the spells were seizures caused by a brain tumor. Hiding them for eight years I imagined the other diseases they might be, such as dissociative identity disorder or schizophrenia, but still told no one. First as a teen, when I told myself that if I didn’t tell anyone about the “spells” I had I could make them go away. I had practiced this sort of magical thinking in my life during my illness. Didion talks about giving away her husband’s clothes but keeping his shoes because he would need them should he return. I compared it to my mother who cleaned out my dad’s closet, removing nearly everything in the five days between his death and the funeral. Over the remaining time I worked with Evelyn, the sweater never moved as if he might put it on at any minute. When I saw Evelyn months after the funeral in her home, his sweater remained draped over the back of the desk chair where it had always been. During the time we worked together her husband faced and lost a battle with cancer. As the title suggests she begins to think like a child does, as if she can change the course of time and bring him back with her actions. She explains how words, which she has used her whole life to find meaning, failed her following John’s death. Didion tells us she wrote the book not to explain her feelings, but to understand her husband’s death. The lines I highlighted are clinical and focused. Though Didion was bereft at the loss of her husband John, I could think of a stack of books that felt more heartbreaking. Since 2009 I’ve read nearly every memoir about death, illness and grieving as I wrote my manuscript about my father’s stroke and my brain tumor. Her text still felt heavy but I continued reading. At 47, he was three years older than his father had been when he had his first heart attack. I had almost lost my spouse to a heart attack only three years after we were married in 2014. Now older and married, I did have something in common with the author. This time, after struggling through the opening pages, which describe how the first lines were drafted, I continued on. I thought of her when I saw her obituary in 2021 and again this fall, a few months before Didion’s death, when I finally read the book. It had been years since I snuck over to Evelyn’s house to drop off the last proofs at her doorstep. Evelyn’s large sunglasses and smart matching suits with twin sets looked very 1960s to my 1990s eyes and similar to Didion’s favored clothing on publicity photos. She dropped names of people in her movement and at the local university in the same way I thought Didion would. “Evelyn” was the head of an educational nonprofit, and I was helping her lay out her quarterly magazine. Her dense writing made me feel self-conscious, as if I wasn’t good enough, the same way a woman I used to volunteer for did. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. My Good Reads list says I started reading The Year of Magical Thinking in 2009 but quit after a few pages. I’ve been reading and studying the form for more than 10 years, but until recently, I was hiding a secret.

I consider myself a creative nonfiction writer.

Year magical thinking joan didion quotes