Inspired by that NY Times list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, I read three short memoirs that I already had copies of in my library. Here’s the first. (These will be briefer ‘short takes’ compared to my usual lengthy summaries with comments.)
I’d read bits of a couple other Didion books before this one came out in 2005, and it must have gotten some buzz, because I bought it right away; my copy is a “second printing before publication.” Maybe I was intrigued by the title, too.
(Knopf, Oct 2005, 227pp.)
Didion, who died in 2021, was a novelist, essayist and screenwriter, and she was married to John Gregory Dunne, also a novelist and screenwriter. (They wrote the film True Confessions together, based on his novel.)
They lived in an apartment on the upper East side, and over the years had lived in Los Angeles (Brentwood and Palos Verdes), in Hawaii, even in Paris. They were not wealthy by CEO standards, but they moved in circles of literati in New York and movie producers in LA. She matter-of-factually talks about seeing this famous person there, or this other one over for dinner, without it seeming deliberate name-dropping. That was the world they lived in.
The book begins with the abrupt death of her husband John, on Dec 30, 2003, as they sat down for dinner. She calls an ambulance, paramedics come, she follows them to the hospital, and has no memory of the trip the next day. The book follows her for a year, until the anniversary of John’s death.
Meanwhile, she deals with their daughter, Quintana Roo [named after a region on the Yucatan peninsula], in and out of hospitals with injuries from a fall.
The early days and weeks after John’s death are numbing. She does what she has to do. She comes to realize she is not thinking rationally. The first example in the book is when she is cleaning out his closet of clothes, and shoes. But not all of them, she thinks, in case he comes back. She quickly realizes what she thinks. But she still can’t throw out all his shoes. It’s an example of a pattern of thinking that persists despite the change of circumstances; it verges on superstition, were she to insist on it, but it’s what she calls ‘magical thinking.’
Over the course of the year, she dwells over how long John might actually have been alive until being pronounced dead at the hospital. She endlessly reconstructs the events of that evening. As the year passes, she reflects on what the two of them were doing precisely a year before. She avoids places where they spent time together.
She ponders the idea of ‘luck,’ whether things somehow work out at the end. She finds solace in geology.
The tone of the book is very reportorial, matter of fact; apparently she wrote the book as a way of working through her thoughts and her grief. (At one point she ponders the nature of grief.) It comes across as harrowing, but brave. She’s *aware* of her ‘magical’ thinking; she’s thinking her way through the entire process. Even if she can’t avoid the ‘magical’ habits of mind that — here we flip to my take — reveal the primitive, animistic, tribal thinking of base human nature. This is a book about experiencing two modes of thinking at the same time. And surviving.
