The Year of Magical Thinking

Dunne collapsed in December 2003. Didion writes the following year: the ambulance, the social worker, the autopsy report, and the specific irrationality she names in the title — the conviction, held alongside full knowledge of the facts, that he might come back and would need his shoes.

Their daughter Quintana was critically ill throughout and died after the book was finished, which Didion addressed in a later volume.

Magical thinking is her term for believing two incompatible things at once, knowingly.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Didion researches her own grief. She reads the medical literature, quotes Emily Post on funerals, examines her own sentences for evasions. The reporter's apparatus is applied to material it cannot handle, and the book is honest that it cannot.

The prose repeats. Certain phrases return, slightly altered, across the book — an enactment of how a mind circles a fact it cannot accept, rather than a stylistic tic.

The repetitions are the grief, rendered in structure instead of described.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

It is unsentimental in a genre that usually is not, and it is specific about the bureaucratic and social mechanics of a death — who telephones, what is signed, what people say.

It is now a standard text on bereavement, recommended clinically as well as read as literature, largely because it declines to offer consolation.

A few lines written days after her husband's death recur throughout the book like a refrain: that life changes fast, that it changes in the instant, that you sit down to dinner and the life you had ends. Didion returns to them not for effect but because she is examining the sentence as evidence — the only thing she could write at the time, and therefore data about that state.

The title is precise rather than poetic. She cannot give away her husband's shoes because he will need them when he comes back — a belief she holds simultaneously with the knowledge that he is dead. The book's subject is the discovery that grief produces genuinely irrational cognition in a person who has organised her life around not being irrational.

She knew he was dead. She also could not give away the shoes, because he would need them.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Her response to catastrophe is to look things up: the medical literature on cardiac arrest, the psychiatric literature on bereavement, etiquette manuals from the 1920s on what the widowed were once told to do. The reading is not consolation-seeking. It is a writer applying the only instrument she has, and watching it fail to produce the expected relief.

Her term for the mechanism by which an ordinary street, restaurant or piece of information opens without warning into a whole region of shared past, making large parts of a city unusable. It is the most precisely observed thing in the book and the part readers who have been bereaved most often say they had never seen described.

Throughout the year she is also attending to her adult daughter, critically ill and repeatedly hospitalised. Her daughter died after the manuscript was finished and before publication, and Didion chose not to revise. The book therefore contains a hope the reader knows was not met, which is not a flaw in it but a condition of reading it now.

She returned to the material six years later in a second book concerned with her daughter, ageing and her own frailty. Read together they change each other: the first is a controlled investigation of a single year, the second is what happens when the investigator can no longer maintain the position of investigator.

It is unsentimental in a genre that rarely is, and precise where most grief writing generalises. The milieu is privileged and some readers find that distancing, but the observations about cognition — the bargaining, the vortex, the inability to act on knowledge — are not class-specific, and that is what has made it durable.