The Christmas of 1990: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking – Manuel Marrero
January 13, 2025
We used to be able to plan around the five day work week. Now with the decay of labor in full swing, too much happens and not enough matters. Especially little things. Joan Didion started writing The Year of Magical Thinking almost a year after her sudden widowing, and the urgency of living in its shadow is pronounced and raw-nerved. The state of grief it portrays is a state of exception, of “extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness,” of “derangement” and delirium, “cognitive deficits,” episodic memory lapses, an unbroken prayer and reverie that hobbles through a crisis middle act where she autopilots her daughter’s harrowing medical ordeal and a seance with the other foot. “I realized that for the time being I could not present a coherent face to the world” speaks to functional, learned helplessness, but she shreds through “the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” The fact it’s written immediately in the wake gives me hope that it can be some other way. It’s like doing the burial yourself, lowering the corpse and shoveling the dirt. It creates a miasmic energy. A vortical voice attends to the “vortex” device— hypnotic, kaleidoscopic memories in a drone-like mantric, metronomic, or musical cadence, her hand almost frenetic and panicked, yet docile, lobotomized. The “fixed circles of impenetrable blackness,” dilated pupils no longer responsive to light, the “pathological bereavement” of “complicated grief,” for which the therapeutic subject is definitively sick but for which treatment is discouraged and considered to “interfere” with a natural process. Down to the maddening mathematics where “Life changes in the instant, the ordinary instant” or as “an error of caution,” a ripple felt as if “in another world” “more beautiful than I can say” where “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Death does something to the past. They leave, but they stay with us, all the superstition and platitudes, and pillars of faith I’ve amassed and amalgamated, chambered to deploy hundreds, maybe thousands of times, ennobled by grief. There is entropy, spiritual death and brain death, temporal death, biological death. You battle it to a draw. Thoughts downhill the whole time. You are “letting go.” Reading this while Los Angeles burned wasn’t lost on me, a personal year of magical thinking the impetus for reading doesn’t elude me. I’m riding the ripples. Calamity after calamity. Each one is the big one. We haven’t had a normal week in years.