It's hard, but I'll have to read it

I've said that before, but everything I read about this book (and the excerpt in NY Times magazine) makes me feel like the odd magical sensibilities during the difficult time, a kind of surreality that I know I've felt myself, will be the reason I'll not be able to put this one off. Joan Didion's recent tragedies are just heartbreaking, tho.

Link: Joan Didion: The End of Life as She Knew It - New York Times.

Books of The Times | 'The Year of Magical Thinking'

The End of Life as She Knew It

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: October 4, 2005

In Joan Didion's work, there has always been a fascination with what she once called "the unspeakable peril of the everyday" - the coyotes by the interstate, the snakes in the playpen, the fires and Santa Ana winds of California. In the past, that peril often seemed metaphorical, a product of a theatrical imagination and a sensibility attuned to the emotional and existential fault lines running beneath society's glossy veneer: it was personal but it was also abstract.

There is nothing remotely abstract about what has happened to Ms. Didion in the last two years.

On Christmas Day 2003, her daughter Quintana, who had come down with flulike symptoms, went to the emergency room at Beth Israel North hospital in New York City. Suffering from pneumonia and septic shock, she was suddenly in the hospital's intensive-care unit, hooked up to a respirator and being given a potent intravenous drug cocktail.

Five days later, Ms. Didion's husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, sat down to dinner in their Manhattan apartment, then abruptly slumped over and fell to the floor. He was pronounced dead - of a massive heart attack - later that evening.

[...]

In her devastating new book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," Ms. Didion writes about the year she spent trying to come to terms with what happened that terrible December, a year she says that "cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

Throughout their careers, Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne wrote about themselves, about their marriage, their nervous breakdowns, the screenplays they worked on together and the glittering worlds they inhabited in New York and Los Angeles. Writing for both of them was a way to find out what they thought; the construction of a narrative was a means of imposing a pattern on the chaos of life.

[...]

During those weeks at U.C.L.A., Ms. Didion says she realized that many of her friends in New York and California "shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful": "They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice." For many years, she shared those beliefs, and yet at the same time she says she always understood that "some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them" and that "some events would just happen. This was one of those events."

Nor could she control her own thoughts. Try as she might to suppress them, memories of her life with Mr. Dunne - of trips they had taken with Quintana to Hawaii, of homes they had lived in Los Angeles and Manhattan, of walks and meals shared - continually bobbed to the surface of her mind, creating a memory "vortex" that pulled her back in time only to remind her of all that she had lost. She began trying to avoid places she might associate with her husband or daughter.

The magical thinking of denial became Ms. Didion's companion. She found herself "thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome." She authorized an autopsy of her husband, reasoning that an autopsy could show what had gone wrong, and if it were something simple - a change in medication, say, or the resetting of a pacemaker - "they might still be able to fix it."

She similarly refused to give away his shoes, reasoning that it would be impossible for him to "come back" without anything to wear on his feet. When she heard that Julia Child had died, she thought: "this was finally working out: John and Julia Child could have dinner together."

[...]

Even when Quintana seems to be making a recovery, Ms. Didion finds it difficult to work: she has a panic attack in Boston, trying to cover the Democratic convention, and puts off finishing an article, thinking that without John, she has no one to read it. She feels "fragile, unstable," worried that when her sandal catches on the sidewalk, she will fall and there will be no one to take her to the emergency room. She takes to wearing sneakers about town and begins leaving a light on in the apartment throughout the night.

In this book, the elliptical constructions and sometimes mannered prose of the author's recent fiction give way to the stunning candor and piercing details that distinguished her groundbreaking early books of essays, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album." At once exquisitely controlled and heartbreakingly sad, "The Year of Magical Thinking" tells us in completely unvarnished terms what it is to love someone and lose him, what it is to have a child fall sick and be unable to help her.

[...]