What does grief look like? What does it feel like? How do people grieve for someone that’s now permanently absent and cope with the underlying loss they represent?
What’s so fascinating to me about The Year of Magical Thinking is that we can actually find the answers to these questions in the very writing style itself. Didion’s diction, sentence structure, and punctuation marks already indicate in the very first chapters what grief is like.
In later chapters, Didion does articulate what it feels like to grieve and mourn. But we can already get a good sense of that if we pay attention to her writing style from the very beginning.
I think the following excerpt from Chapter 2 captures so well how Didion faced grief in its initial stages.
CLOSE READING EXCERPT
I. NUMBNESS OF GRIEF
This passage illustrates the numbness of grief, more specifically the numbness that comes on the onset of grief. There’s like a back-and-forth tango going on here as the hospital staff do something or say something, and then Didion responds. She only responds. She never initiates anything here.
This sense of passivity, as if things are being done to you instead of you doing things, is reflected in the sentence structure. From a sentence structure point of view, the subject is often the hospital staff, while Didion’s often the object.
When Didion does appear to be the subject of a sentence, it’s only in response to someone doing something for her or asking her a question. And her responses are so brief, as if she can’t muster the energy to say more.
All these elements collectively communicate a sense of being overwhelmed, because it truly is difficult, if not impossible, to make decisions or initiate action when you’re in shock. Didion here is still unable to process the tragic event, thus numbing herself to it. In fact, in page 51, Didion writes, “The most frequent immediate responses to death were shock, numbness, and a sense of disbelief.”
And that’s the thing, you can see this numbing of emotions in what she chooses to leave out from this excerpt. You don’t see Didion mention anything here about feelings, only action. And not talking about her feelings, in what we assume to be a very emotionally-charged event, evokes a certain detachment. She doesn’t describe anything about her surroundings either, nor are any of the people in this scene named. It’s just action after action after action.
So from this fast-paced action and lack of details, you get the sense that she’s dazed and shocked, too overwhelmed for her brain to process anything other than the immediate. She’s really not engaged.
II. MEANINGLESSNESS OF EXISTENCE
We also get hints of the meaninglessness of existence that Didion later talks about in one of the—I have to say—best paragraphs from the book. (That’s Chapter 17, page 202, for those of you out there who want to get your gut punched.)
In the excerpt, Didion writes,
It’s not even “A priest appeared and said ‘words.’” Phrasing the sentence that way would merely imply Didion’s inattention. But instead, she wrote, “A priest appeared and said ‘the words.’” What the priest said was supposed to be healing, but Didion made it sound formal, empty, and devoid of any meaning. Whatever profound sentiments were said rang hollow to her at that moment.
So it’s amazing how she was able to add another layer of meaning just by inserting that one word. Didion is so meticulous with her writing in that way.
III. MODERN ANTI-GRIEF CULTURE
Later in the book, Didion also criticizes how the modern attitude towards grieving as an act of self-indulgence represses the very necessary act of grieving. She touches on this theme in the excerpt when she called herself “the cool customer.”
Actually, the “cool customer” is what the social worker called her earlier. But she repeated it here in order to poke fun at the term, thus questioning what it really means. Because she’s actually not “cool” at that moment; she wasn’t okay. But because she wasn’t crying or hysterical or really, showing much emotion, she was thought of as “cool.”
This is another theme that runs throughout the book—which is that our outsides may not necessarily match our insides. Didion later on writes about how well-meaning friends compliment her for being calm and rational, especially during such a difficult time. Inside, however, she’s so disoriented and still kept hoping her husband would come back (thus she didn’t want to donate his shoes).
And in the context in which the social worker said it, being “cool” sounded a lot like a compliment to Didion’s character. She quotes Geoffrey Gorer in saying that our cultural attitude is “to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened” (p. 66).
This is why the social worker felt the need to praise Didion at the hospital and call her a “cool customer.” We’re often uncomfortable with others’ pain because we’re taught to hide our pain from others, to keep everyone comfortable. Showing pain has definitely become its own sort of taboo. That’s why people are secretly relieved when someone who’s probably experiencing pain doesn’t show it. People are relieved because our “enjoyment” (p. 66) is not spoiled.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
As I was reading the excerpt from Chapter 2, without Didion even describing her emotions or surroundings, I can already sense her intense isolation. I can vividly imagine her moving through the hospital corridors with a protective film around her. If there was a camera following her, it would be in a shallow depth of field wherein everything around her is blurred out. That’s how I imagine this scene to be because Didion evokes detachment from everyone else, even from herself, so precisely with her word choice and sentence structure.
When her husband died, Didion was not overwhelmed in the sense that you would see her scream and cry. It’s more of a quiet kind of being overwhelmed, an overwhelming numbness where you can’t feel anything because you can’t quite process anything.
The passage from page 19 functions as a microcosm of most of the things that Didion talks about in the book, which is why I think it’s genius.
And one last thing. The Year of Magical Thinking really reminds me of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Both Gregor Samsa in the latter and Joan Didion in the former suddenly reckon with the absurd.
Samsa, when he woke up as a cockroach, immediately thought of the logistics of his new situation and thought about how he was going to work now that he was a cockroach. In the same vein, when her husband suddenly died, Didion immediately thought of the logistics of the situation as she prepared medical papers and filled out form after form.
Perhaps a theme that runs throughout well-written works then, is how people adapt to and make meaning out of an existence inherently devoid of any.
What are your thoughts on The Year of Magical Thinking? Let me know in the comments! I also wrote a book review for this title in my April reading wrap-up.
If you like this kind of article, my most recent book analysis is on Sally Rooney’s Normal People. If you’re interested in reading more grief memoirs, I reviewed Canadian poet Lorna Crozier’s in my March reading wrap-up.
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Thanks so much for reading!
— Alyanna
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Reflections on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (CORE)
The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion and the dialectic of grief (British Medical Journal)
‘The Year of Magical Thinking’: Goodbye to All That (The New York Times)
