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Year magical thinking joan didion quotes8/21/2023 By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. Read Full Review >Īs her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of Decem. Perhaps we are witnessing a special sort of grief, grief in a woman whose longstanding defenses have been overwhelmed. Paradoxically, an account of grief that aimed for universality would overflow with memories of the person lost. When Didion quotes poets, she intends to clarify her own grief. Didion's techniques diverge subtly from Styron's. Didion reports these experiences, along with some of grief's differentiating traits. the emptiness of depression, the superstition of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the agoraphobia of anxiety states, and the terror of post-traumatic stress disorder. On the other hand, the function of Didion's book is precisely to tell us what we might expect. Few of us can say how we would fare with a child in intensive care and a spouse fresh in the grave. her daughter, Quintana Michael, lay comatose in a hospital bed, Didion watched her husband, John Gregory Dunne, die of a heart attack. But the implicit claim to cultural significance is harder to assess. The Year of Magical Thinking is raw, brutal, compact, precise, immediate, literate, and, given the subject matter, astonishingly readable. The difference between her own fragments shored against these unhappy ruins and those fragments - fanciful wishes and narrow half-truths and gaudy amulets - marshaled by her previous subjects is this: We are left with the impression that her near-pathological honesty will in time allow her to cope - without magic - with things falling apart. inhabits a surgically precise idiom like an A student at medical school, snaps commands and reminders at doctors and orderlies, looks to these potent words and slabs of information as bulwarks against the dilating pain of helplessness and loss. the words she hears and repeats are no longer just words but magical words, charm words. Many such wishful episodes revolve around how Didion uses language to try to preserve order and continuity. The Year of Magical Thinking is an aching - and achingly beautiful - chronicle of this year of fragments shored against Didion's ruins. The lines that now reverberate in her inner ear are Eliot's: 'these fragments I have shored against my ruins.'. In her new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, the life that persists amid the disorder is Didion's, and the salient tatter of poetry that inspires her is from T.S. In the matter-of-fact, almost comma-less prose that is her hallmark, Didion illuminates the bond between husband and wife in terms both homely and indelible. The book is an exacting self-examination, but it is also a heartbreaking, though far from sentimentalized, love letter, engrossing in its candor. She doesn't do the feeling for you, but her unfussy prose elicits a rush of emotion in the reader. Remaining a cool customer has been Didion's life's work. her writing, with its tautness and precision, is itself a way of imposing order on the illogical, preserving sanity in the face of turmoil. The Year of Magical Thinking forces her to confront this issue in an especially personal way: It deals with the death of Didion's husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, which occurs in the midst of their daughter's hospitalization for a winter flu that had turned life-threatening. Joan Didion has long grappled with what is out of our control and what is within our control, life's uneasy balance, or imbalance, between circumstance and free will.
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