Earlier this year, Sloane Crosley released a book called Grief Is for People. Detailing the loss of her close friend and mentor, Russell Perreault, it is, in many ways, a spawn of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (this connection can be read about more in-depth in the Vol. 37 issue of The Opiate). Crosley, accordingly, is not shy about referencing it a few times throughout the examination of her own grief. After all, it has consistently been recommended as essential “grief reading” ever since it was published. Indeed, when Didion’s book was first released in October of 2005, no time was wasted on showering it with praise. It not only won the National Book Award, but was also heralded as an “instant classic” on the subject of grief, filling a void where nothing but cheesy self-help books existed. And yet, The Year of Magical Thinking is not without its own brand of cheesiness. This includes the overwrought Didion method of frequently repeating select phrases throughout the same book both for dramatic effect and so as to beat the reader over the head with them. Case in point, “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,” “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant,” “I tell you I shall not live two days, Gawain said,” “How does ‘flu’ morph into whole-body infection?,” “You’re safe. I’m here,” “Why do you always have to be right?,” “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end,” “More than one more day” and “We call it the widowmaker, pal.”
While, obviously, Didion possesses a deft hand when it comes to making the reader understand that, essentially, there are actually no truly effective words to describe the sense of loss she’s feeling, what strikes one about reading The Year of Magical Thinking, years after its universal acclaim, is the flagrant codependency she reveals in her dynamic with Dunne. A dynamic that, rather than being questioned for its unhealthiness, was instead upheld as some kind of ideal for monogamy. Particularly monogamy between two writers. Even so, the fact that they came to the brink of divorce by 1969 (after only five years of marriage) proved to be telling. Rather than divorcing, however, Didion simply turned the possibility into material with her famous line, “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” It was a sentence dropped in casually, but the dramatic effect was impactful, with many friends and acquaintances whispering in hushed tones about it afterward, some asking John directly if he knew she was going to write that. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan confirms, “Did he know I was writing it? He edited it.”
It is this kind of “writerly closeness,” this “literary power couple” aura that so many writers (“legitimate” or otherwise) still seek to find and emulate in their own lives. Ignoring the fact that what should be the crux of the takeaway is that Didion and Dunne seemed so often on the verge of divorce, especially in those 60s and 70s years. Did anyone ever stop to think that, apart from just “financial reasons” (though they never stopped taking their trips), it might have had to do with constantly being together? The toll that might take? Although Didion’s eight-hundred-word article was meant to be a simple, “fluffy” introductory piece to serve as her first column in Life, that line was intended as the “gut punch” to prove she wasn’t about “fluff,” even in a fluff piece. She was about a kind of merciless nihilism. A surgical precision. It’s the same approach that appears in The Year of Magical Thinking, even if it is intended to be a book about grief, mourning. But Didion is ultimately “looking under the hood” with the same clinical coldness she’s known for. Yet readers and critics alike continue to mistake the tome as some unprecedented, remarkable statement on what it means to lose someone you loved. Particularly from the standpoint of being so enmeshed with them.
It is that enmeshment that keeps shining through more than the grief aspect itself. Even Didion acknowledges that perhaps the couple’s mutual dependency on one another was not quite “ordinary,” noting at one point, “The second kind of grief was ‘complicated grief,’ which was also known in literature as ‘pathological bereavement’ and was said to occur in a variety of situations. One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another. ‘Was the bereaved actually very dependent upon the deceased person for pleasure, support or esteem?’ This was one of the diagnostic criteria suggested by David Peretz MD, of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. ‘Did the bereaved feel helpless without the lost person when enforced separations occurred?’”
Later in the book, Didion concedes to that “unusual” dependency by stating, “John and I were married for forty years. During all but the first five months of our marriage, when John was still working at Time, we both worked at home. We were together twenty-four hours a day, a fact that remained a source of both merriment and foreboding to my mother and aunts.” She continued, “I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him.” And it wasn’t always just about writing. Though there are plenty of pictures of them in “work mode” together. Exhibiting, once more, the kind of closeness that writers (especially female ones) fantasize about in terms of coupledom. But John, at some point, found enough time away from Joan to engage in some purported infidelity. At least, that’s how it seems in Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Didion, The Last Love Song. In it, Daugherty writes, “Contributing to their difficulties at this time were the stresses of writing, money, lots of drinking, Dunne’s quickness to anger and Didion’s ‘theatrical temperament.’”
In the aftermath of going to Hawaii, as any bourgeois couple would to (not) deal with their issues, Didion would remark, “If you can make the promise over again, then the marriage should survive. I don’t really think infidelity is that important.” Pretty evolved thinking for a “Goldwater Republican” from Sacramento. Yet one tends to be skeptical of her insistence upon that point. After all, it appeared Dunne was kept on a tight leash, even while Didion attracted crushes from people like Warren Beatty in the days of throwing parties at their Portuguese Bend home. Regardless, the traditionalism and rule-obeying nature ingrained within the fabric of Didion’s being (it was a source of pride that her ancestors followed the charted map to California instead of veering off course with the Donner Party) meant divorce was never really in the cards. They were always going to leave the Royal Hawaiian Hotel intact. It seemed, in truth, that stirring up that kind of drama was a means to disrupt their life of privilege together. To give it some “spice” where things might have been getting too comfortable.
Even so, their marriage did remain just that. A security blanket for both to wrap around themselves every day. As such, when The Year of Magical Thinking came out, Didion would also note that younger people seemed to be reading it like a marriage manual rather than a rumination on grief. But, in reality, Didion and Dunne are a cautionary tale of what not to do. To become so intertwined that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. So of course grief is going to be magnified tenfold when a relationship is set up like that.
This isn’t to say that one should never get attached to another person (though, truthfully, that is kind of the ideal way to mitigate pain), but it is to say that the way in which we attach should amend itself from the false narrative presented by Hollywood movies and the people who wrote them (*cough cough* Didion and Dunne). But Didion herself was a victim of being brainwashed by Hollywood with quaint tales of eternal love and promises of forever. As a middle-class Sacramentan, going to the movies regularly as a child was very much “a thing” for Didion. It was there that she first fell in love with John Wayne (racist prick or not).
As her nephew, Griffin Dunne, would point out of his aunt being enamored with Wayne, “He’s, you know, a protector. And you married a protector.” She agreed, adding, “Also a hothead.” Later in the same documentary, she said, “Everything would set him off.” Living in such close and constant proximity to someone with that type of personality doesn’t exactly sound like “a gas,” nor something to aspire to. And yet, Didion simplified it all by noting, “I liked being a couple. I liked having somebody there.” Even if that somebody was prone to fits of rage and volatility.
It’s never been said if that temperament “softened” over time or if Didion merely grew to accept it as yet another aspect of “what it took” to be with Dunne. Eventually, this also meant moving back to New York in the late 80s in spite of her grand kiss-off to it in “Goodbye to All That.” Evidently, it was okay to return to the fair you had already stayed too long at if it was in service of your “better half.” The half who finished your sentences and who served as a perpetual sounding board—even first thing in the morning. To that point, Didion mentions in The Year of Magical Thinking, “I used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day. ‘Don’t tell me your dream,’ he would say when I woke in the morning, but in the end he would listen. When he died I stopped having dreams.” A new height of codependency.
Funnily enough, though, it seemed Dunne was less the draw for her in the beginning than his family. She said she fell in love with the Dunne brood after visiting them in Hartford—that the meeting was the tipping point for her to know this was the person she wanted to marry. What she wasn’t admitting to herself, perhaps, was that the Dunnes represented the kind of East Coast pedigree and “sophistication” (Irish or not) she could only marry into. After all, this was a woman who still pronounced Prix de Paris as “Pree duh Puh-ree.” Once a Sacramento shitkicker, always a Sacramento shitkicker—even if you spent some of your adolescence living in a palatial abode at 22nd and T Streets.
Marrying Dunne was, in effect, another successfully ticked box on the list labeled “Escaping Sacramento.” The stain of it. There was a reason she seemed so determined to distance herself from it during the pinnacle of her “cool” years in the 60s and 70s, saying things like, “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento” (the quote that would come to serve as the opening title card to Lady Bird). She was “beyond it” now. Living in LA with East Coast cachet. Her obsession with reading was also part of the escape plan. And it was that avidity for acquiring more knowledge that kicked in during the difficult period from 2003 to 2005, when she would also have to deal with her daughter’s failing health at the same time as losing her husband. While Quintana is hospitalized in the background of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion describes reading How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland, Intensive Care: A Doctor’s Journal by John F. Murray, Clinical Neuroanatomy by Stephen G. Waxman and The Merck Manual. It’s all part of Didion’s exacting need to understand the mechanics of an event. As she mentions more than once, “Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.”
Didion doesn’t seem to take that into account in terms of how the information she reveals about herself can be weaponized. Not just in The Year of Magical Thinking, but in the numerous essays she released over the years. Including the aforementioned one during which she casually mentions the potential of divorcing Dunne. Before that sentence, she writes (without any self-awareness), “I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, watching the long, translucent curtains below in the trade wind, and trying to put my life back together.” Didion seems to have no idea of how much she’s screaming “white people problems” with this description, nor does she seem to care.
The Royal Hawaiian comes up again in 2017’s South and West (originally written in the 70s), as she ruminates on its so-called decay by saying, “By the time I started going to Hawaii the Royal Hawaiian was no longer the ‘best’ hotel in Honolulu, nor was Honolulu the ‘smart’ place to vacation in Hawaii, but Honolulu and the Royal Hawaiian had a glamor for California children who grew up as I did” (again, some more apparent insecurity about being from Sacramento). Of this comment, one reviewer rightfully highlighted the fact that Didion “lives a lifestyle foreign to most all Americans, those who will never summer at the Royal Hawaiian no matter how far the hotel slips down in the rankings.”
Most Americans (among others), too, will never live the romanticized version of coupledom/constant companionship that Didion plays up in The Year of Magical Thinking, only to realize what the ultimate consequence of that codependency is: “ceasing to exist” when that person dies. Worse still, Didion suddenly notices how old she is, lamenting, “…when John was alive I saw myself through his eyes and he saw me as how old I was when we got married—and so when he died I kind of looked at myself in a different way.” Not just as someone who had become “old,” but as someone who was finally an independent entity again.
Maybe I’m wrong, of course. Maybe I’m simply speaking from the perspective of having only been romantically linked to writers who insisted we spend a “healthy” amount of time apart.