Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

After her husband is pronounced dead, the social worker assigned to Joan Didion reassures the doctor that she is “a real cool customer.” This coolness translates into her recollection and attempt to understand her loss, which sadly prevents the reader from forming any lasting emotional connection to her story. After their daughters hospitalization with pneumonia, Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne return home and prepare for dinner. Mid-conversation, Dunne suffers a fatal cardiac arrest. The Year of Magical Thinking is written in the year after his death, and follows Didion’s grieving process while her daughter is readmitted to hospital after collapsing.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

Didion attempts to understand her emotional reaction to her husbands death, an intensely personal and painful process. Throughout, however, she remains objectively detached, even in her description of her most intimate thoughts, fears and revelations. She remembers times spent together with Dunne, what that meant then and now, things that were said, the meaning of which have changed for her. At times Didion’s journalistic instincts take over the emotional impulse, she researches the psychological effects of grief, she buys impenetrable textbooks on neuroanatomy to try better understand her daughter’s condition. Information, she claims, is the key to control. She is continually seeking official documentation, learning the medical jargon to be able to locate some rational sense in her loss.

For a memoir which focuses solely on loss, death and mourning, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is life affirming, but distanced. At the same time, I think my failure to really deeply connect with this is due to my not having experienced such a profound loss. I enjoyed Didion’s map of human consciousness, the bizarre and seemingly irrational paths our minds take, and her honesty about her relationship.