Book Review: The Year of Magical Thinking
This was an unexpected expected book. Meaning that I knew it was about grief and also about ‘sods law’, which means everything you think could go wrong, irrevocably, goes wrong. Or, as we say in England: 'Shits hit the fan’. I knew it would be helpful and angry with different iterations of ‘you have got to be kidding me?!’ But I also didn’t expect grief and hardships to be written with such kindness, with zero ‘woe-is-me’ mentality, which is a pit that is easy to fall into at any point during grief. Victim mentality is the easy path and one I think we can all relate to at some point, but getting your head out of it is tough. Didion doesn't fall into that role; why? Because she is a woman and she has shit to do. That’s why! She has too many spinning plates to keep an eye on to let herself fall apart. And that, in short, is what the book is about.
What do I mean by ‘sod’s law’? Because it’s the holidays and Didion’s daughter is in the ICU when suddenly her husband John drops dead in the middle of their living room. It’s not that it was unexpected; John had a heart condition dubiously dubbed ‘the widow maker’ but it was rather fucked that it had to happen while her daughter was on death’s door. I don’t really know what Didion was expecting when she started writing down her thoughts about the year when everything kinda went to hell. But whether she knew it would turn into a book, it’s hard to say. She is first and foremost a writer. And what do writers do? They write; they get it out of their systems and try to make sense of the chaos without drowning in it.
I think what surprised Didion most about grief was that it didn’t immediately come around the block for her. She was too busy being a mum, too busy trying to make sure her daughter got back to peak health and out of the hospital for good. I saw the surprise and wasn’t surprised. Grief can smack you in the face at odd moments, or it can build throughout the day. But the killer. The real ‘you have got to be fucking kidding me’ moments lie in the fact that life just moves on with or without you. But irrevocably without the person you wish was there. My god, grief’s a bitch.
I realise that this is full of profanity. Harsh words that don’t often find their way into a book review. But when you’ve been through the wringer, dragged backwards through a bramble bush that’s home to a pack of wolves attached to a vehicle travelling over 100 miles an hour. You get it. Didion gets it. So fuck grief, fuck death, fuck the victim mentality. Fuck it all. We should all cut each other some slack and try and navigate what we’re left with once death has come and gone with the ones we love. While there isn’t exactly a ‘road map’, The Year of Magical Thinking is as close as it gets.