Privilege and Loss: The Year of Magical Thinking

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

So begins Joan Didon’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir encapsulating a year of her life following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. It is a phrase, along with several others, that becomes a mantra throughout the pages of the book. They are pages that weave between the anecdotes of a wealthy and priveliged life the universal questions of death; of control, helplessness, foreshadowing, loss.

Reading anything by a renowned author is always weighted with expectation. Judgement is temporarily suspended in respect for the writer’s fame and achievement. If a book is not all it’s author is talked up to be, what then? Is it my job to reassess my own opinion of it in order to match it with the literary majority? These were the questions that came with my reading of my first work by Joan Didion; a writer I had heard much of but never read. My review, therefore, follows purely my own experience of reading it. I will attempt to disregard the four pages of critical appraisal between the cover and the first chapter in my own judgements.

The Year of Magical Thinking is not a page turner. It is repetitious, with much extraneous explanation and was heavy with unremitting questioning. “The question of self pity.” Didion repeats over and over.  But the all pervading feeling is not of self pity, but of a desperate attempt to regain control, to take back the reigns of a world spinning out of orbit. Cataloging the minutes and hours before and after John’s cardiac arrest, Didion details her desire to know the exact moment when all was lost. “I had to believe he was dead all along. If I did not believe he was dead all along I would have thought I should have been able to save him.”  Whilst her daughter Quintana spends months in intensive care in various hospitals fighting mutating infections, Didion must accept her inability to assure her daughters survival, just as she was unable to prevent her husbands death.

The memoir testifies the impossibility of acceptance, of ever knowing fully or understanding enough. “Did he have some apprehension? A shadow? Did he know his time was running out?”

As she moves through the process of grief and mourning, Didion desparately attempts to avoid ‘the vortex’, namely places and reminders of her life ‘before’. Yet through the vortex Didion takes us on a guided tour through a life of enviable privelige, achievement and prestiege, one that jars oddly with the starkness of her subject matter. Chapter after chapter we are drawn into the world of Didion and Dunne’s extravagant lifestyle; decades of exclusive restaurants and prolific travel during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Despite it’s telling in a setting of memory and loss, the average reader may balk a little at Didion’s descriptions of taking a return flight from L.A to San Fransisco ‘to have dinner’ in the 60s, or of her descriptions of dozens of vacations to Honolulu, houses in Malibu and Brentwood Park, months-long stays in ritzy hotels, production company sponsored trips, and ‘commuting’ between Malibu and New York for work.

Yet despite this, the writing  pulls the reader through the narrative’s stagnant parts. Much of it is strong, almost all of it succinct. The memoir forces self reflection. It’s themes draw together to communicate a worldview, account for a life lived and depict the realities of death and of what remains for those left behind. Despite it’s flaws, The Year of Magical Thinking spoke enough of Joan Didion’s writing for me to add Run, River and Slouching Towards Bethlehem to my reading list.

Sandwiches and Cake

Heavy. She’s so heavy. The brother nine years older takes up the fourth corner, suit smart againt the dark wood. But I don’t remember what he looked like back then. Just her – wreathed in dasies in a bed of white. And my throat tight and sore. I suffer the strain and I don’t cry. Eyes smarting, the bench hard beneath me. They shift it, hoist it on their shoulders and for a moment I am terrified it will fall.

In the church yard a bleak, heatless sun shines on dewy grass. There is the sound of dirt hitting wood and the sharp inhalation that is muffled greif. Outside on the steps we are small childish faces moving between skirts, and there is red chewing gum being offered. My small fingers receive it guiltily and my cousin Lily, placid and smiling, jolts at once through my body the absurdity of this thing. And so we leave one less, away from the black stones and the wet, shadowy garden to eat sandwiches and cake.

*

I saw it again today by suprise through the rain. It was a dark shape solid in the distance, and I recognised the familiar words. Holy Trinity. And I remembered with a start the ache in my throat, the dasies, the red gum. I walked towards it in the rain and thought – for fifteen years here it’s sat, and I suddenly began to feel the weight. Nothing had changed. It was grey and austere and softened only by the gentle green leaves of oaks. In the rain I stopped on the steps and tasted the drops that fell from the eaves and felt six again. Will that weight always envelop me like this?

A grandmother. You were always and forever after loss. The wasted life. You, my firt half formed concept of a life lived and ended, of a person now here, now gone. The strangeness of flesh, the unlikeliness of life. The absurdity of our own weak condolences and confirmations of its importance. That day- my first taste of the desparate vigils we perform to affirm that we are more than the sum of the clothes we wore and the books on our shelves. But perhaps not much more than the hazy picture that remains in the minds of the ones that carry our weight.

The collected suicidal writers (part 1)

There’s nothing quite like the satisfying feeling of cleaning out a wardrobe, cabinet or bookshelf. After purging your life of extraneous and unwanted clutter some sort of internal cleansing seems to have taken place, only what really matters is left and you have extra space to revel in before you inevitably fill it with more clutter. What’s even better though is watching a friend or relative rid themselves of unwanted goods and being first in line to pick through the op-shop pile. Yes, this has happened to me a number of times, the most fulfilling usually occurs when Katie attempts to rid her overflowing clothes drawers of some excellent ‘last-season’ goodies. But actually what I inherited from my sister’s bookshelf last week was two poetry volumes ‘The collected poems of Emily Dickinson’ and ‘Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems’; remnants from year twelve literature.

 ’Do I really want to keep these?’ Annie asked. Then, answering her own question ‘No. Emily Dickinson was a psychopathic maniac. When am I ever going to read her poems again?’

‘I’ll take them!’ I immediately volunteered. ‘I’m partial to the psychopathic maniac female writer.’

‘Really?’ She looked surprised as I snatched them greedily. It was my first open confession of a growing morbid fascination; I had already written a research paper on Virginia Woolf and just last week finished Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar.

People sometimes describe a great novel using words like ‘gripping’ or ‘thrilling’, an experience where words ‘jump off the page’. I have to concur with some of these clichés; there were sentences in The Bell Jar that did stand out in bold for their blunt, unashamed honesty. And what struck me was reading a chapter and feeling as though the words in print were exactly what would have poured out of my own mouth at some points in my life had I had the ability to articulate them. Especially the parts about sex: ‘when i was nineteen, pureness was a great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line. I thought it would be the way I’d feel if I ever visited Europe.’

The Bell Jar is an internal monologue of a year in the life of Esther Greenwood; an intelligent scholarship student who goes from a promising honours candidate to a suicidal patient in a mental institution receiving shock treatments to try and cure her depression. Throughout the second half of the book, Esther contemplates and makes various attempts at suicide by drowning, hanging, cutting her wrists, jumping from a bridge and so on; ‘I could see that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage without any sense at all.’ Esther doesn’t succeed in her mission during the course of the novel; the last page sees her stepping into the office of her rehab clinic where a panel of doctors will determine whether she is well enough to go back to college. What is most chilling about The Bell Jar though is that Sylvia Plath’s own suicide followed only a month after the first publication, printed under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas. The book is thus branded a roman a clef, a partial autobiography, making the thoughts of Esther Greenwood frighteningly real, a mirror of it’s authors own experience. More horrifying still though is a memoir written by one of Plath’s first publishers, which convincingly claims that Sylvia Plath never intended to kill herself but rather ‘to be found and saved’ and she died ‘only because of a freakish series of accidents’.  :O

I wonder if my interest in suicidal manic-depressive feminist writers should alarm me a little. Nah. I could hazard a guess that in the last forty years millions of literature essays, poetry analysis and feminist papers have been submitted on the life and work of Sylvia Plath.

Now I have to admit that I have done little more than flick though the collected works of poetry yet; but they are safe and sound in my almost entirely narrative-based bookshelf. Makes me feel just a little bit smarter having them there in between Maggie Alderson and Meg Cabot.