The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
"The Autumn of Joan Didion", Atlantic Monthly
Caitlin Flanagan Jan. /Feb. 2012
In “The Autumn of Joan Didion” in the Jan./Feb. 2012 issue of the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan writes that she believes that Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, e. Maybe my problem with The Year of Magical Thinking, is that when I first read her I am firmly entrenched, um, on the other side of that cusp.
Those who presumably came across Didion during their womanhood-cuspdom and are admirers of her work, often seem to relish the small details that are threaded throughout the book. The details act as weights do to curtains, holding down something that might otherwise be carried away by a light wind. Details though, can turn on you during grief, as when Didion, after her husband's unexpected death, tries avoiding the photographs on her walls as she walks to her room and finds it useless: she has them memorized,
“I remember that we all made soufflés. Conrad’s sister Nancy in Papeete had shown Katharine how to make them work without effort and Katharine showed me and Jean. The trick was a less strict approach than generally advised.”
The cataloguing of details was a bit too much for me and my post-womanhood-cuspdom, especially when the brand of water purchased gets space.
When Didion is approached by the doctor to tell her that her husband in dead, the social worker assigned to her assures the doctor that he needn’t worry about her reaction, that she is “a pretty cool customer.” Didion (rightfully) is bothered by this reference but says nothing and accepts the news with dignity and wonders what an uncool customer might have done. “Break down? Require sedation? Scream?” She doesn’t, but she never forgets that comment.
When my grandfather was in a coma in the hospital, shortly before he died, I remember that the doctors thought that maybe my grandmother did not understand what was going to happen, that she did not understand that once medical intervention was withheld that he would die. And from outward appearances maybe she too, appeared as a “cool customer.” She made jokes; she helped me jokingly hold the bathroom door shut on what we thought was my mom (don't ask). She didn’t, that I saw, scream, faint or make a scene in anyway. Perhaps, she too, like Didion was busy collecting the small details that would have to sustain her afterwards, that would act as beacons back to the living when their pleas to the departed to come back were denied.
My grandmother and Didion didn’t conform to what society has come to expect of grief, especially of older women. They didn’t lay bare the nature and depth of their grief for all to see. If they were men, once upon a time it might have admirably have been called, keeping a stiff upper lip. We don’t do that though these days. We connect. We socialize. We have a status that need to be updated. We are a global community. We forget that there are other ways to be, other ways to love. That the surface can be just that, the surface. Didion’s book if it does nothing else, illustrates this.
