Many such wishful episodes revolve around how Didion uses language to try to preserve order and continuity. “I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away the shoes) if the thought has lost its power.” “The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought. “I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return. “I could not give away the rest of his shoes. She goes to his office with garbage bags for the clothing there. In one scene, Didion cleans out Dunne’s closets, bags his T-shirts, shorts and socks and drops them off at the church across the street. The book moves in and out of scenes, across 40 years of marriage and one year of disarray it is littered with halting, half-connected lengths of narrative. It’s as if her “thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, to change the outcome.” As if her magical thinking would fix the world that has fallen apart. When she writes of “magical thinking” - or “delusionary thinking, the omnipotent variety,” or “the way children think” - she’s not speaking figuratively. “The Year of Magical Thinking” is an aching - and achingly beautiful - chronicle of this year of fragments shored against Didion’s ruins. But when Michael arrived at LAX, she fainted and later underwent six hours of neurosurgery to relieve a hematoma. Five days later, after Didion returned home from a hospital visit, her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, collapsed at the dinner table with a fatal coronary.īy the end of January 2004, her daughter’s condition had improved a memorial service was held for Dunne, and Michael made plans to recuperate in Los Angeles with her husband. On Christmas Day 2003, her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was admitted to the intensive care unit at Manhattan’s Beth Israel North hospital after a bout of flu became pneumonia and then septic shock a coma was induced and Michael was placed on life support. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” 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. Her pieces examine how lives do and do not withstand such disintegration.
Despite our nostalgic illusions - of the sort she dissolved in her 2003 book on California, “Where I Was From” - no center has ever held. Although she has an acute sense of historical decay - of the discontinuities that estranged the Haight-Ashbury generation from their parents’ universe, of the focus-group politics that have estranged us from Washington - her writing encompasses far more than stories of contemporary decline.
What Didion does is something more difficult and enduring. To say that those essays as well as her subsequent works also reflect the notion that things are falling apart is a literary allusion that many will recognize in most ways, it is perfectly true.
The back cover of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion’s first collection of essays and the book that established her as one of a handful of major contemporary writers, advises that her pieces “all reflect, in one way or another, the notion that things are falling apart, that ‘the center cannot hold.’ ” That phrase is from Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” the poem that provided Didion with the 1968 book’s evocative title such slouching perhaps now is more firmly associated with Didion than with Yeats.
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