The Year of Magical Thinking

Didion struggles with thinking of herself as a widow. She also recognizes that she never felt fully comfortable thinking of herself as a wife or a mother. She had tried to fit into what she felt was the proper mold of these respective roles, but it felt more like improvisation than it did a part of her being. Most of her marriage with Dunne had been an improvisation. The plans they made for their lives, for money and homes, came as a result of luck. They sold their house after giving up on believing they would ever sell it and escaping to Honolulu on a vacation they could not really afford. Didion views the role of widow as an extension of the improvisation she and Dunne performed throughout his life. 

Now eleven months since Dunne’s death, Didion tries to engage with the future. She puts up Christmas lights just as she did before her husband died. She also struggles to engage with society. When she attends parties, she leaves early and has difficulty expressing interest. She attempts to write again, knowing that this time her husband will not be there to look over the piece before she publishes it. She struggles to complete it, and, when she finally does after imagining Dunne is prompting her to finish, she finds numerous errors. She hopes that her cognition will one day return, but she accepts that this is just one part of the grieving process.

Didion cannot help but draw correlations between this December and the last. In many ways, the mechanics of preparing for the holiday are the same. In many other ways, everything is different. While finishing her yearly dentist appointment, she realizes that her husband will not be in the waiting room, ready to take her to lunch. Noticing something out of place, Didion is finally compelled to look at the books on the table by Dunne’s chairs, as she had left untouched. The books provide clues of a timetable leading up to Dunne’s death. She recalls Dunne sharing with her that he did not think he could cope with Quintana’s illness; Didion told him he had no choice.

In this chapter, Didion presents several fractured memories from the days leading up to Dunne’s death. She recalls Quintana’s husband remarking on her beauty and something Quintana said when she was still a little girl, awaking from a nightmare: “Don’t let the Broken Man catch me” (219). Didion had told Quintana that she was there, just as she had in the hospital when Quintana was fighting for her life. However, it was Quintana’s strength that kept her from being caught. Didion muses that Dunne’s death was an inability to escape the Broken Man.

Didion shares a passage from her book Democracy which describes a 9.0 Richter earthquake which led to a tsunami. Didion is unable to shake her imaginings of this occurrence. She tries to visualize the plates buckling beneath the Indian Ocean. She repeats the line: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end” (222). On Christmas Eve, Didion attempts to proceed as normal. She throws a party for family and friends, just as she and Dunne did every year. On Christmas Day, she visits St. John the Divine to decorate her husband’s vault.

Didion attempts to offer the reader resolution, but she does not feel resolved. It occurs to her that moving on, moving forward, means distancing herself from memory. She does not feel ready to distance herself from her husband or his death. She knows that, at some point, she must let go of him and allow all her experiences to fade into memory. The chapter dissolves into a connection of memories. The lei she places on Dunne’s vault, given to her the day before by a friend, reminds her of the leis she and Dunne threw into the water as they left Honolulu. She recalls swimming with Dunne in a cave. Didion was fearful that the tide would shift, but Dunne was not. Even then, Dunne was teaching her a lesson that she must accept change.