The Year of Magical Thinking
When I was thirteen I read a lot of books by Lois Duncan. Killing Mr. Griffin, Summer of Fear, Daughters of Eve, Locked in Time, Crooked Window, Stranger with My Face, A Gift of Magic, The Third Eye, I Know What You Did Last Summer--to name a few. These books vary from being scary to suspenseful to kind of creepy. Thinking about it now, those seem like unusual choices for me. Those aren't the kind of books I generally gravitate towards (at that same time I was also reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and things like that). Anyway. I remember being in 7th or 8th grade and browsing the oh-so-impressive Wood Middle School library--home of great literature that it was--and finding Who Killed My Daughter, also by Lois Duncan. It is about five times thicker than her other books and it is further different in that it is a book about her own life: the murder of her daughter and her search to find the killer. A paragraph break seems necessary, so...
It is a long and dry book. Filled with cryptic transcripts from meetings she had with psychics and an instance in a run-down barn where she feels the presence of her daughter's murderer, but never actually sees him. A spoiler is coming up, so if you want to read the book, stop here. She never finds out who killed her daughter. It was a drive-by-shooting, I believe. At that time, it was a disappointment to me. I didn't understand a book written as a way for the author to figure things out for herself. The concept of writing as journey wasn't something I was familiar with--especially not from Duncan who, up to that point, had given me suspenseful, two-hundred-pages-or-less books that were entertaining, but hardly thought provoking and even less apt to draw my attention to the experience or metacognitive process of the author.
Today I finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. In some ways it reminds me of Duncan's book. It is Joan Didion's attempt to deal with the death of her husband, John. Maybe "deal with" isn't even the right phraseology for what I'm trying to express. In some ways it is really just a record. There are times and dates and medical information and how-she-felt-at-this-moment, etc. By the end of it I wasn't taking away some message or statement on death--Didion herself didn't seem to the point of having a philosophy or understanding of death or life or fate or whatever. It is interwoven with memories and scenes in which you get the flavor and weight of their marriage--yet it is always, always enshrouded in a retrospective feeling. She is always looking back. And I felt that I, like she herself, wasn't sure what she was really seeing anyway.
Her husband died December 30th, 2003. She started writing the book less than a year later, in October of 2004. At that time I was in my second month as BYU. Eighteen. Freaked out. Losing control. I wish I had known that Joan Didion was writing this book at that same time. I think it would have been comforting, but I really don't know why.
She dedicates the book to her husband and her daughter. She was writing for them, sure--but really, it seems like she was writing for herself. It's not an exciting book. It's not a suspenseful book. It's not even really intense. It is steady and honest. As I was reading it I felt like I was doing so for Joan. Sounds stupid and sappy, I know, but the whole books feels like a sounding board in a way. As though by reading it I became someone to listen to her--so she could bounce ideas off of me, try to make sense of it. It's insightful. But not heavily so. There are phrases she repeats over an over--not so much like motifs as much as a kind of string or chain that leads you around and around, in a gently shifting cycle.
It is, essentially, a book about grief. Not mourning, but grief. There is a difference. Didion defines it. Read and find out.
Overall, I liked it. There were, of course, a ton of references to events, people, etc from the sixties and seventies that I was completely ignorant of.
"Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself." -The Year of Magical Thinking, pg 189
It is a long and dry book. Filled with cryptic transcripts from meetings she had with psychics and an instance in a run-down barn where she feels the presence of her daughter's murderer, but never actually sees him. A spoiler is coming up, so if you want to read the book, stop here. She never finds out who killed her daughter. It was a drive-by-shooting, I believe. At that time, it was a disappointment to me. I didn't understand a book written as a way for the author to figure things out for herself. The concept of writing as journey wasn't something I was familiar with--especially not from Duncan who, up to that point, had given me suspenseful, two-hundred-pages-or-less books that were entertaining, but hardly thought provoking and even less apt to draw my attention to the experience or metacognitive process of the author.
Today I finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. In some ways it reminds me of Duncan's book. It is Joan Didion's attempt to deal with the death of her husband, John. Maybe "deal with" isn't even the right phraseology for what I'm trying to express. In some ways it is really just a record. There are times and dates and medical information and how-she-felt-at-this-moment, etc. By the end of it I wasn't taking away some message or statement on death--Didion herself didn't seem to the point of having a philosophy or understanding of death or life or fate or whatever. It is interwoven with memories and scenes in which you get the flavor and weight of their marriage--yet it is always, always enshrouded in a retrospective feeling. She is always looking back. And I felt that I, like she herself, wasn't sure what she was really seeing anyway.
Her husband died December 30th, 2003. She started writing the book less than a year later, in October of 2004. At that time I was in my second month as BYU. Eighteen. Freaked out. Losing control. I wish I had known that Joan Didion was writing this book at that same time. I think it would have been comforting, but I really don't know why.
She dedicates the book to her husband and her daughter. She was writing for them, sure--but really, it seems like she was writing for herself. It's not an exciting book. It's not a suspenseful book. It's not even really intense. It is steady and honest. As I was reading it I felt like I was doing so for Joan. Sounds stupid and sappy, I know, but the whole books feels like a sounding board in a way. As though by reading it I became someone to listen to her--so she could bounce ideas off of me, try to make sense of it. It's insightful. But not heavily so. There are phrases she repeats over an over--not so much like motifs as much as a kind of string or chain that leads you around and around, in a gently shifting cycle.
It is, essentially, a book about grief. Not mourning, but grief. There is a difference. Didion defines it. Read and find out.
Overall, I liked it. There were, of course, a ton of references to events, people, etc from the sixties and seventies that I was completely ignorant of.
"Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself." -The Year of Magical Thinking, pg 189
posted by Sylvia Louise at
3:17 PM
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