Reflections on the life and death of author Joan Didion Inbox

 

Joan Didion, author of “The Year Of Magical Thinking” has died.  According to her obit in Huffington Post "Didion, whose writing shaped American literature for decades, was also famous for her novels “Play It As It Lays" (1970) and “A Book Of Common Prayer” (1977), as well as essays such as “On Keeping A Notebook,” “Why I Write” and “Goodbye To All That,” many of which ended up in her book of essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968).

"She won several Lifetime Achievement Awards, and in 2006, she was a Pulitzer finalist for her 2005 memoir “The Year Of Magical Thinking,” about the death of her husband, John Dunne, and her subsequent mourning."

My Comments:  What a life Joan Didion had. It perhaps was divided into the life with her husband John Dunne whom it can be certain to say she loved and then after the death of Dunne when she had to deal with his death and then the brutal illnesses of her daughter which must have tortured her soul until the daughter died. Her grief did not even end there.

The Year of Magical Thinking I think was a profound statement of her life after John's Death of a heart attack while eating dinner and after her daughter's sad ordeals. Those of us who have known tragedy in our lives surely can relate to our attempts at prayer and its hope that magical thinking will cure our loved ones and strike down the impossible sadness in our soul's response to their life and ultimate death.

An Excerpt from In The Year of Magical Thinking:

"Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened.

For a long time I wrote nothing else.

Life changes in the instant.

The ordinary instant.

Didion says: "At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, "the ordinary instant." I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. He was on his way home from work -- happy, ..."

Didion's most profound statement "And then -- gone." "In the midst of life we are in death, ..."

My Comment: Rest in Peace, Joan Didion. Finally your quest for a peace is upon you perhaps what you never knew in life.

More of Joan Didion:   https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4956088