Joan Didon’s husband died on December 30, 2003. He had a massive heart attack. 10 months later, she began to write about the experience.
The Year of Magical Thinking is a portrait of grief. I think what really struck me was that she was unable to just sit and wallow in her grief. She had to pick up and be strong for the people around her. On the night her husband died, they had just returned from visiting their daughter who was in a medically induced coma. They were unsure if she was going to live. In a strange twist of fate, her husband was in fact the person who did not live.
It is hard to imagine what it must have been like to have your partner of over 30 years pass away suddenly and also have your only child be in such a precarious medical condition. Throughout the book, she makes it clear that he was a partner in every way to her for many years. The sudden loss of this support system must have been such a difficult thing to experience.
It is interesting because she makes it clear that to her, his death was sudden and unexpected but he seemed to foreshadow his own death. From Didon’s retelling of her conversations with her husband in his last years of life, he seemed to believe he was living on borrowed time. It was almost as if he knew he would be leaving her at a difficult period in her life.
This was the first book I’ve read by Joan Didon. I didn’t know much about her or her husband other than Claire Messud recommended reading her books. I look forward to reading more of her works and also exploring her late husbands various works.
