year magical thinking joan didion quotes

She talks of days when she “relied” on Matthew Arnold and W.H. I had the book he was reading when he died and his favorite black shirt I could smell him because I had taken to wearing his Le Male cologne.Įarly in the book, Didion laments that literature about grief “seemed remarkably spare.” The poetry, though, was robust, and it “seemed the most exact.” Didion quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins and e.e. “He who left faint traces before he died.” Of course my boyfriend could come back, I thought. “I didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back,” Didion writes of losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne. I read Didion’s memoir in gulps and as fast as I could, baffled and ecstatic to see my own thoughts rendered on the page: the need to detail to myself, again and again, what happened the desperate search for omens the toggling between lucidity and fantasy. I do remember that it seemed like a better choice in the moment than “Where Is God When It Hurts?” which sat uncracked on my kitchen counter where someone had left it for me. I don’t recall when, exactly, I slid “The Year of Magical Thinking” off my bookshelf, or why. I slept on the couch because my bed - any bed - seemed like a grave. The notes scrawled inside reminded me that things would get better. Condolence cards showed up at my apartment. “I can’t imagine how I would feel if my boyfriend died,” an acquaintance told me, crying at the mere thought. Friends and teachers told me how sorry they were and that they were sure he had been an interesting person. In the environs of my past life, he was the stranger. I flew back east to start my senior year of college. What right did I have to that experience, that privilege? None, I thought, ashamed. I was a stranger to them, a 20-year-old American who somehow wound up at their loved one’s side when he died, the last person to hear him speak, laugh, breathe.

I declined to attend the ritual burning but flew to be at the gathering of friends and family in Vancouver. There was a cremation in his chosen home (Thailand) and a memorial service in his birthplace (Canada). For a few days, his family thought he might be one of them. He didn’t know it yet but he had survived a tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands. When he was able to surface, there were bodies floating in the sea. 26, 2004, he had been scuba diving when the water suddenly pulled him down, down, down. Shortly after we met, he described how, a year and a half earlier, on Dec. He was beautiful and funny but prone to melancholy and haunted by shadows. Had it ended differently, it would have been a cliché: I traveled to Southeast Asia, met a man and discarded my plans for teaching English to follow him wherever he was going, which happened to be on a backpacking trip with his cousin.

I put the book on a shelf and forgot about it.Ī few months later, in the summer of 2006, I fell in love. At the time, I had never lost anyone close to me. Perhaps a memoir about the death of a spouse and the looming loss of a child seemed too distant to comprehend. Still, I didn’t read the book right away. It was all but a requirement of my existence: I was a female college journalist, editor of the school paper and an English major to boot. It was a new book, published that fall, with an eggshell cover and a slim turquoise spine. Sixteen Christmases ago, my parents gifted me a copy of “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion.

Year magical thinking joan didion quotes