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After a week of emotional wallops, try A Year of Magical Thinking.
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Image: Politics and Prose
It’s been a rough week. Here in DC we’re still grieving from the horrific metro accident that happened earlier this week. Then the news of Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett hit. Now the King of Pop himself has departed for a better place.
Needless to say, the air is heavy. People are distraught, sad, shocked. And there isn't a single roadmap or set of directions to really help any of us get though it. But as Joan Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, “In time of trouble…read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.” And that’s just what we can do with Didion’s sharply written memoir chronicling the death of her husband and subsequent grieving process.
It was deep into the summer, some months after the night when I needed to be alone so that he could come back, before I recognized that through the winter and spring there had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.
You won’t find directions for grieving in her prose, but you will find comfort in recognizing the process itself as a long, extraordinary, deeply personal journey that we all experience at some point. Didion leads the reader along on her journey in a manner that is at once painfully intimate and thoughtfully distanced. You see her own personal struggle trying to navigate an endless rush of emotions and wanting desperately to just make sense of it all, to find a logic behind something so indescribably painful as losing someone you love.
But perhaps the most important gift Didion leaves us with in this book is her candid description of just how weird and difficult and “magical” the grieving process really is—you walk away understanding that those irrational and unexplainable feelings are actually normal. Just knowing that makes finding your way out of the dark and disorienting world of grief and learning to let go of a loved one somehow more fathomable.
Want to catch the stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking? The one-woman show based on the book is on for one more week at the Studio Theater.
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