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“this happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you . . .”
In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir (which Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times called “an indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage), Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play.
The first theatrical production of The Year of Magical Thinking opened at the Booth Theatre on March 29, 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
- Sales Rank: #399978 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-04-02
- Released on: 2009-04-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
Reviews for the memoir: 'It is the most awesome performance of both participating in, and watching, an event. Even though Didion does not allow herself to break down, only a terribly controlled reader will resist doing the same., Independent 'Ultimately, and unexpectedly for a book about illness and death, this is a wonderfully life affirming book., Observer 'Searing, informative and affecting. Don,t leave life without it., Financial Times 'This is a beautiful and devastating book by one of the finest writers we have. Didion has always been a precise, humane and meticulously truthful writer, but on the subject of death she becomes essential., Zadie Smith 'Taking the reader to places where they would not otherwise go is one of the things a really good book can do. "The Year of Magical Thinking" does just that, and brilliantly. Powerful, moving and true., Spectator 'A great book, a great work. Angular, exact, pressured and tough, precise as a diamond drill bit., Nick Laird
About the Author
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction.
Joan Didion's Where I Was From, Political Fictions, The Last Thing He Wanted, After Henry, Miami, Democracy, Salvador, A Book of Common Prayer, and Run River are available in Vintage paperback.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
This happened on december 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you.
And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you.
That's what I'm here to tell you.
We had come home. "Home" meaning an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Early evening, maybe eight o'clock. We discussed whether to go out or eat in. I said we could stay in, I would build a fire.
The fire was the point.
In California we heated our houses by building fires. In Malibu we built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night.
I built the fire. I drew the circle.
I have no memory of what I meant to have for dinner.
Memory stops. The frame freezes. You'll find that's something that happens.
I warned you. I'm telling you what you need to know.
You see me on this stage, you sit next to me on a plane, you run into me at dinner, you know what happened to me.
You don't want to think it could happen to you.
That's why I'm here.
John was in his office. I got him a drink. He sat down by the fire to read. He was reading a bound galley of David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? I set the table in the living room, where we could see the fire.
I must have noticed that later. The name of the book. I eventually read it myself, but found no clues.
Wait. I was telling you what happened.
He wanted a second drink. I got it. He asked if I had used single-malt scotch for the second drink. I said I had used whatever I used for the first drink. "Good," he said. "I don't know why but I don't think you should mix them."
I was at the table, making a salad. He was sitting across from me, talking. Either he was talking about why World War One was the event from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed or he was talking about the scotch, I have no idea which.
Then he wasn't. Wasn't talking.
I looked up. I said, "Don't do that." I thought he was making a joke.
Slumping over. Pretending to be dead. You've seen people make that kind of tiresome joke. Maybe you've done it yourself. Meaning "this was a hard day, we got through it, we're having dinner, we've got a fire."
In fact neither of us had yet said out loud how hard that day had been.
My next thought was that he had started to eat and choked. I tried to move him so I could do the Heimlich.
He fell onto the table, then to the floor. There was a dark liquid pooling beneath his face.
Within what I now know to have been exactly five minutes, two ambulances came. The crews worked on the living room floor for what I now know to have been exactly forty-five minutes.
I now know these facts because I obtained the documents. I obtained the Emergency Department Nursing Documentation Sheet. I obtained the Nursing Flow Chart. I obtained the Physician's Record. I obtained the log kept by the doormen in our building."Paramedics arrived at 9:20 PM for Mr. Dunne," the log read."Mr. Dunne was taken to the hospital at 10:05 PM."
The distance from our apartment to the ambulance entrance of New York Cornell is six crosstown blocks. I do not remember traffic. I do not remember sirens. When I got out of the ambulance the gurney was already being pushed inside. Everyone was in scrubs. I noticed one man who was not in scrubs. "Is this the wife," he said to the driver. Then he looked at me. "I'm your social worker."
And I guess that was when I knew.
That's something else to remember. If they give you a social worker, you're in trouble.
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.
Those were the first words I wrote after it happened.
And after that--
I'm a writer--
But after that I didn't write anything for a long while.
For several weeks after it happened I tried different strategies for keeping on the correct track. One that worked for a while was repeating to myself the last two lines of "Rose Aylmer," Walter Savage Landor's 1806 elegy to the memory of a daughter of Lord Aylmer's who had died at age twenty in Calcutta. I had not thought of "Rose Aylmer" since I was at Berkeley, but now I could remember not only the poem but much of what was said about it in whichever class I heard it analyzed. "Ah what avails the sceptred race!" it begins. "Ah what the form divine! When every virtue, every grace, Rose Aylmer, all were thine!" "Rose Aylmer" worked, the lecturer said, because the overblown and therefore meaningless praise in those first lines gets thrown into sudden, even shocking relief by what he called "the hard sweet wisdom" of the last, which suggest that grief has its place but also its limits: "A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee."
"A night of memories and sighs," he repeated. "A night. One night. It might be all night but he doesn't say all night, he says a night, not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours."
Hard sweet wisdom. Clearly, since "Rose Aylmer" remained embedded in my memory, I believed it to offer a lesson for survival.
2
I told you I knew when I saw the social worker but I didn't really.
Or more correctly--"correctly" is important to me--I knew but I refused to know.
There's a certain kind of personality--my own, maybe yours--that sets great store on seeing it straight. For certain of us this is a big ego point.
You might think you'll see it straight but you won't.
You'll be standing in some ER and at one level you'll have a pretty clear idea of whatever it was that just happened but you'll see it as a kind of first draft.
Notice the evasion there. "Whatever it was that just happened." The actual words will have vanished from your accessible vocabulary. The only words at hand will have to do with how this can be corrected.
Reversible error.
If you're a lawyer you're probably thinking she doesn't know what "reversible error" means, but I do.
There was a verdict here. Find the right error and the verdict gets thrown out.
And errors are easy to find.
If you're me.
For example this is the wrong hospital.
This is a perfectly good hospital but it's not "our" hospital. It's New York Presbyterian Cornell. "Our" hospital is New York Presbyterian Columbia, a hundred blocks uptown. So while I stand in line to show the insurance cards--nobody told me to stand in this line but I see it as a constructive step, proof that I'm handling the situation--I tell myself that as soon as he is stabilized I can move him to Columbia.
He will need a bed with telemetry. When I arrange the move I need to specify this.
Notice that only "I" can do this. I do not distrust those in charge here, but I do feel compelled to manage them.
I go further. I see a plan falling into place. Once Quintana is stabilized I can also move her to Columbia.
Maybe I didn't mention this before.
New York Cornell is not our first hospital of the evening.
The first hospital of the evening was Beth Israel North. You know, the one that used to be Doctors' Hospital. Across from Gracie Mansion. Where our daughter has been in an induced coma in the sixth-floor ICU since Christmas night with what began as the flu and is now septic shock.
Another case of the wrong hospital.
From my point of view.
But just try telling a grown child that the easiest emergency room on the Upper East Side doesn't necessarily add up to the right hospital.
Try telling her anything, once they sedate her for the endotracheal tube.
Must you always have the last word, John said when we fought.Which was often. Must you always be right. For once in your life just let it go.
When we saw her tonight in the ICU her hair was damp and matted from the fever. No one seems to have brushed it. I have been trying to brush it since the day after Christmas but cannot. I could always brush her hair. I could brush her hair even in Malibu, when it was long and bleached from the sun and green from the chlorine in swimming pools and she had been in the water all day. She would come up from the beach and John would wrap her in towels on the deck outside his office and I would brush her hair.
"I love you more than even one more day," he said to her tonight in the ICU.
He said that on each of the five nights he saw her there.
On the chance she could hear.
He said it tonight just before we came home and discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in. Just before I built the fire--
No.
The lights are too bright in this hospital. It's too cold.
If I hold focus I can arrange for both of them to recuperate at Columbia. Adjoining rooms. The McKeen Pavilion. I can go up in the afternoons and have tea with them in the atrium while the volunteer pianist in scrubs plays "Isn't It Romantic." I can stay until eight and the car will be waiting and I'll come downtown and build a fire and make myself a hamburger. I'll think about John and Quintana in their adjoining rooms but I'll still have a fire and I'll still eat the hamburger and I'll still watch Chris Matthews on rerun.
Because I will have arranged for them to be safe. I will have brought in the appropriate specialists. I will have made sure that each of these specialists appreciates the entire picture. I w...
Most helpful customer reviews
747 of 780 people found the following review helpful.
Deserves to become a classic memoir about grief and loss
By Kcorn
I stayed up almost all might just to finish reading it, unable to put this down, although I confess I had to keep a box of tissues nearby. I've lost 5 people in the last few years and, just recently, another friend and so I related very strongly to this book.
Didion's unflinching account of the sudden loss of her husband (which occurred while their only child was in a coma in a hospital (!)) deserves to be a classic in the genre of books written by and for those who are grieving. It is hard to find books like this, which are both honest but not overly sentimental, not resorting to the tropes which seem to surround death. She doesn't offer vague platitudes or advice. She simply relates her very personal experience, including the inevitable vulnerability, unexpected moments of being blindsided by memories and sudden tears, etc.
She covers all the bases, including the kind of insanity that can seize one in the throes of grief, those moments when you forget the person is actually dead, when you turn to speak to him or her as you normally would at a certain part of the day or reach for the phone to share the latest news.
The book is raw. If you're looking for religous or spiritual guidance and inspiration, this is not the book for you. As Didion herself noted, writing about the book recently, it was intentionally written "raw". I assume she didn't want to wait, to distance herself from the intensity of the experience as she wrote it down, quite unlike many other books she has written. Raw or not, it wasn't sloppy, overly sentimental or complete despairing.
It was simply honest, heartwrenchingly so, and Didion doesn't deviate from communicating, in absolute striking detail, the sense of alienation and disorientation that separates mourners from those who seem to be living "normal" lives. Grief is its own territory, separate from so-called normalcy. In so many ways, it is an illness, an affliction of the spirit and not one that can be cured in any one way.
An aside- the photo of Didion inside the dustjacket is haunting. No question that those are the eyes of someone who has been scraped to the core, wounded and, presumably, still recovering. There is something beautiful in that portrait and, oddly, comforting. It is the face of a survivor, however hard it might be to live as one.
This book will remain on my bookshelf and I expect I'll be thumbing through it for solace time and again. Reading it was both painful and cathartic and strangely comforting, with an intensity that left me awestruck. I am still amazed that she was able to produce such a beautifully written book in the throes of so much pain.
531 of 560 people found the following review helpful.
Don't hate me, but
By J. R. SOUTH
I'm not 100% sure why I bought this book. Certainly, the extremely generous reviews were a big push, as much as the fact that I recognize that Joan Didion is a superb writer. Maybe more than that, because I lost my mother and my grandmother within a very short span of time, and they lost their brother/son, then father/husband, in an even briefer time period. For awhile, "Magical Thinking" enthralled me with Didion's honesty and brutal detail. It even gave me nightmares, which I'm sure was not the author's intention, but that's how effective the writing is.
Part of Joan Didion's truthfulness is in dealing with her own avoidance of grief, and the extent to which an extremely intelligent, ever-thinking person will go to escape facing pain. But halfway through this short book, only 105 pages from the end, I almost gave it up, and I'm not sure I'm glad that I didn't. The endless facts, medical explanations, and most of all, Joan's continuous detachment from any emotion, left me feeling beat up and worn down. Yes, it even annoyed me a little. I give her all the credit in the world for approaching her task. Her love for her husband and daughter is extraordinarily apparent by the picture she paints of them, but she still comes through as only an observer. "The Year of Magical Thinking" is written in the first person, but not for a split second do we get a glimpse of any sensitivity coming from her. She only looks, thinks, and writes. But who is Joan, and what is going on inside her? Anything at all??
Buddhists have a valuable outlook on death. They meditate on it regularly, often among the bodies of the departed. Not viewed as morbid or surprising, death informs them how to appreciate life. In the West, we are always stunned by death, and instead of being always ready to accept it, by being kind to one another, knowing how quickly and unexpectedly a lifetime ends, we spend all our energy denying its existence, even after we've lost someone we love. And now we have a bestseller that tells all, except that it's normal and right to feel the pain.
Whatever else this book might be, it is definitely NOT a thesis on how best to deal with death and tragedy. And despite all the praise, "Magical Thinking" will not be everyone's cup of tea.
634 of 697 people found the following review helpful.
The Magical Thinking of Denial
By prisrob
"Grief is a multi-faceted response to loss. Although conventionaly focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has a physical, cognitive, behavioural, social and philosophical dimensions." Wikipedia
Joan Didion starts her book:
"Life changes fast
Life changes in an instant
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."
On December 30, 2003 Joan and her husband, John Gregory Dunne were just sitting down to dinner about 9pm. They had returned from visiting their daughter, Quintana, who was comatose in an ICU in New York City. They were having a conversation as Joan put dinner on the table. She looked up, it was very quiet, John was not responding. He was slumped over the table with his hand raised. She realized all was not well, and in that instant her life changed. An ambulance was called; the trip to the Emergency Department, the meeting with the doctor, massive heart attack mentioned, and she knew her husband was dead. She returned home alone, did a few chores and went to bed and slept soundly. She awakened and realized something was wrong, and her first taste of grief descended.
Joan Didion has written a devastating story of her first year after the death of her husband, and the grief that enveloped her. She writes as she thought, and the story is laid out in detail as it happened and in her own words. She has friends and family but John isn't there. She talked to him every day for the forty years they were married. They talked constantly and were with each other all the time. Even though conventional wisdom has it that absence makes the heart grow fonder. She remembers thinking "there is no one to hear the news, no where to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back". Life changes in an instant. There is no place on earth to go where there is no memory. She kept expecting him to come back. She couldn't get rid of his shoes, because he needed shoes to come back. She knew this thought was irrational, but it kept her going.
She kept busy helping her daughter and son-in-law put their life back together, and then it comes apart when Quintana becomes ill again. There is much to do, much to read about Quintana's illness, much to discuss with the hospital staff that look at her strangely when she discusses edema and too much "fluid overload". She immerses herself in the language of medicine, and it keeps her busy for a while. She tried new projects, nothing really works except time, but she still keeps expecting John to come home. He never does. She remembers all the little things he said about his life. He told her they had to go to Paris that November because he might never have the chance again. He was right. He was frequently right. And, oh, she misses him, she always will. Magnificent story of the year in the life of grief. Highly recommended. prisrob
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