I finally read the bestseller `The Year of Magical Thinking’, by American literary giant Joan Didion. It is an exceptional book – part memoir, part journalism – that she began writing eight months after the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne.
The pair had just returned from visiting their only child in hospital. She was in a coma and on life support after falling seriously ill. Didion made a fire. She served her a husband a drink of whiskey while he read, then made dinner. As they sat at the table, she tossed the salad and listened as he spoke before noticing he had fallen silent. He had died from a massive heart attack.
She opens her book, “life changes in the instant, the ordinary instant.” So ended one of America’s greatest literary partnerships. The Didion-Dunnes had been together 40 years. Literally. The writing couple had spent very little of their marriage apart. Didion jokes in her book that her mother and aunt would warn her, `till death do us part, but not for lunch’, in response to the amount of time the pair spent together. Both worked from home. They would spend each day in their separate offices writing; before meeting for lunch and dinner, often at a restaurant. I think they were in lifelong limerance.
They enjoyed separate success as writers but did collaborate on several screenplays including A Star Is Born, a huge hit for Barbra Streisand.
Four weeks after Dunne’s death, their daughter pulled through only to suffer a massive hematoma in her brain, necessitating a six-hour operation and beginning a slow decline in her health.
Didion began writing this book 8 months after her husband’s death. It chronicles that awful year without sentimentality, with a cool, lucid eye. It is telling of her fierce nature that she could write with such clarity in the midst of heartbreaking, bewildering chaos. It took her three months to write . The novel is an elegant and dense treatise on the nature of grief and grieving, and the crazy thinking that accompanies mourning.
“Marriage is memories. Marriage is time,” she writes at one point. And one can feel quite keenly the loss of her mate and all the shared memories that bind together the lives of two people.
Shortly before its publication, Didion’s daughter died.
This is Didion reading from The Year of Magic Thinking. Close your eyes and listen.
