Joan Didion will speak with Christopher Lydon regarding her new book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” at 6:30 p.m. today at the First Parish Church. Tickets cost $3 and can be purchased at the Harvard Book Store or by calling (617) 661-1515.



For anyone who wonders whether an account of a year of personal tragedy and grief can be anything more than a chronicle of catharsis that happened to get published, Joan Didion’s new book “The Year of Magical Thinking” answers with a resounding—though indirect—yes. While it is self-centered in the sense of being autobiographical, “Magical Thinking” elicits much more than mere pity or sympathy in the reader.

“Magical Thinking” is Didion’s account of the year following her husband John Gregory Dunne’s death of “a sudden massive coronary event” on the evening of December 30, 2003. Five days prior to Dunne’s death, their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne had gone to the emergency room with a flu that had become pneumonia, and then slipped into septic shock. These two events and their aftermath are the primary focus of the book.

Early on in “Magical Thinking,” Didion declares that “the way I write is who I am, or have become,” and this is indeed carried out in the fractured, meandering style of her prose. Passage of time appears to hang on the end of a bungee cord: snaking back through memories, or dragging through each present day as it comes, but always snapping back to the day of Dunne’s death. Didion recounts the events of this day eight separate times.

This repetition counteracts the effects of what Didion terms “magical thinking.” Magical thinking is a form of denial combined with childlike logic which causes Didion to believe that if she does certain things, then her husband will return: the game will be over and everyone will stop pretending he is dead.

While denial is a common reaction to tragedy, Didion takes it to wretched levels of absurdity, demanding an autopsy out of the absurd conviction that if something simple caused Dunne’s death then perhaps it could be reversed. Somehow, even after the autopsy, the funeral, and the cremation, she panics, convinced that Dunne has been buried alive. Rather than seeming ridiculous, this bizarre line of thought and the absurd behavior it engenders comes across as horribly sad.

Dunne’s death is not the only event that triggers denial for Didion. Quintana’s sudden life-threatening illness and its aftereffects present a current crisis to contend with and avoid worrying about, on top of grieving for Dunne.

These events acquire a new poignancy outside the year Didion chronicles: while the book was in the final stages of editing, Quintana died.

Didion explicitly chose not to add an account of her daughter’s death to Magical Thinking. That fact in itself augments Didion’s refusal (in the book) to accept the possibility that Quintana could die, and gives a heartrending overtone of futility to Didion’s fierce maternal desire to protect her.

“You’re safe. I’m here” is Didion’s mantra, her reassuring magical thought that will keep her daughter alive. But as Quintana moves from hospital to hospital, staying healthy for less than a month at a time, the truth behind the magical thinking refuses to be ignored.

So Didion moves on from denial to distraction, obsessively doing crossword puzzles, and alternately losing herself in strings of related memories or trying to avoid sights that bring about such memories. Many are tender scenes of married life, and quite a few are humorous.

For example, while waiting to visit Quintana at a hospital in New York, Didion recounts the day when three-year-old Quintana stuck a seed pod from their garden up her nose and her doctor had to be called away from a dinner party to remove it. Quintana apparently enjoyed such an adventure, and stuck another seed pod up her nose the next day in order to repeat it. Such moments provide a fuller range of emotional experiences than might be expected in a book about grief.

Didion periodically references catastrophic tragedies (the 9/11 attacks, plane crashes, violence in Kirkuk) in order to explain her emotional state, saying that she can relate to family members of those who died in these sudden, unexpected events. While these references to large-scale devastation seem melodramatic at times, they still serve as a sort of tie to universal grief, momentarily taking the focus off of Didion herself to remind the reader that this is above all a book about grief, not just one death.

Yet it is ultimately Didion’s writing style that connects her to the universal human condition. What makes this book succeed is Didion’s uncanny ability to let the reader see through her eyes, an ability that extends beyond the adage “show, don’t tell” (which Didion accomplishes with virtuosity) to the inclusion of fragments of poems that she pores over and medical reports that she struggles to translate into lay terms.

By compelling the reader to struggle with her to interpret “left tentorial subdural hematomas,” and dive with her into memories of family dinners, Didion simultaneously gives insight into her personal moments and provides situations to which the reader can relate.

We may not have been there on her trip with Dunne to Hawaii, but everyone has memories of family vacations. Everyone has stories of childhood emergency room visits. Everyone has experienced a love and a loss; Didion articulates her own in a manner that is at once strange and familiar, beautiful, and devastating.

—Staff Writer Marin J.D. Orlosky can be reached at orlosky@fas.harvard.edu.