I have always loved Joan Didion's books, especially the essays. In some cases, such as Slouching towards Bethlehem, or The White Album, I care about the subject of the essay; but in Miami, or Salvador, I don't – yet it's the sentences that are always so amazing, so eerily short and blunt, yet so utterly perfect. Almost as though there's no translation between her and the words – something M. F. K. Fisher also manages at her best (in The Gastronomical Me, which is among the finest and most honest of autobiographies).
I've had Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking on my shelf for a few months, a little unwilling to pick it up; it is her book about the year her husband died and her daughter nearly did, twice, and so I knew it would be pretty grim. Given that Didion is pretty grim anyway, I was a bit worried about reading that one; as you might expect from my background, there are plenty of books on illness, death, loss, mourning on my shelves, but I wasn't certain how this one would be, or whether I was up for reading it on any given day. So I opened it Friday evening, rather sleepy, and read until dawn, finishing it around 7:30 am.
Well, it's very beautiful, very perfect. Not because it was calculated to be that way: there is a sense that this is the finest artistry, that of being completely clean and honest – even the ending, when she admits she doesn't want to end the book (and I didn't want to stop reading it), doesn't manufacture a neat or pat or symbolic closure to its shattering experiences; and it doesn't do some sort of nihilist/modernist tailing-off, either. It feels very fair and real, and as though she wrote it while thinking: what would John have felt was fair to him, if I'm going to write about his death?
It was certainly a terrible time for her – it has always been clear that she was dependent on him for stability and optimism, that her own tendency towards fear, fragility, and depression would have overwhelmed her years before if he hadn't been around. And in fact this book tells a bit more of their daily life together (of which little flashes had appeared in previous books, occasionally) and how much they worked together, spent practically all their days, even most of their hours, together: in the early pages I couldn't help thinking, oh no, there's no way she'll be able to keep writing now that he's gone. (I was never interested in his writing – John Gregory Dunne: a guy's novelist, the thinking-person's end of the best-sellers – but for me he's always been that wonderful man who keeps Joan Didion going, which is enough for me to care about him.)
But there's also a clear sense, which even comes out of her prose towards the end of the book – though I wouldn't say it to her face – that she's internalized him enough to continue, in her seventies and however much longer she lasts (may it be long), thinking and writing, almost as though he's not gone at all: she may miss the daily talk, the exchange, the proofreading, the argument, but she'll keep going, almost as though he's right there the whole time.
Good for her.
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