Audra Schroeder
“Grief when it comes, it is nothing we expect it to be.” The topic of loss has never been channeled as elegantly as through Joan Didion in 2005. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she makes the aforementioned statement early on, and her tale of grief unfolds whether you’re ready or not. For Didion, the year of 2004 was one of denial and disbelief: or perhaps just the suspension of belief. Didion’s replays of the night her husband John Gregory Dunne died in December of 2003 range from torturous to therapeutic, and her pain is weighted to infinity as her only child, Quintana, lies in a coma at a nearby hospital. It is a riveting read, because we the readers are her audience, listening to her monologue as she repeatedly changes it for discomfort. Of course Didion has never been about comfort. Her novels and essays have always dealt with borderline psychosis and anxiety decorated with silvery detachment. Her “magical thinking” involved similar antics: not moving her husband’s shoes in case he came back, avoiding nostalgic landmarks in L.A. while visiting her ailing daughter, so as not to trigger the “vortex effect.” And yet, for a book about grief and death and personal hell, it moves in a way so raw and beautiful, like accidental poetry. Thank God it didn’t end up in Oprah’s book club.This article appears in 2005.