My book club chose to read
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion for its December selection. This memoir is an account of the year following the sudden and unexpected death of the author's husband, John Gregory Dunne. Didion dispassionately equates her grieving process with temporary insanity, becoming almost obsessed with the medical condition that killed her husband, feeling that she could have done something to avert the tragedy, refusing to give away his possessions because he might come back and need them, and deliberately avoiding all locations (around the world) associated with him. I did not relate to this book at all. It is an intellectual, rather than emotional, response to the death of a spouse of 40 years which reads like a treatise on grief (even citing research). I had not read anything by Didion, or her husband, before and I found it rather off-putting that she kept quoting herself throughout. I did not understand any of the references out of context. I also found all of her name-dropping to be quite annoying, mostly because I didn't know the majority of these New York literati. I was further alienated by her lavish and privileged lifestyle. The fact that she
still had to send out her laundry no matter how empty she felt did not leave me very sympathetic! Once again, whenever I dislike something that has received such glowing reviews, I wonder if I have missed something. However, I sometimes had the sense that this memoir was Didion's self indulgent way of coming to terms with her own grief with memories and anecdotes only she can appreciate and that it was published and so well received solely because of her friendship with the aforementioned New York literati. I can appreciate Didion's exceptional writing style, but I wouldn't recommend this memoir.
Note: To be fair, this was probably not the best thing to read while teaching
Hamlet to my seniors and
Night, by Elie Wiesel, to my sophomores.
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