The Year of Magical Thinking

The summer after her husband’s death, Didion begins to feel unstable. She always leaves the lights on and stops wearing sandals in case she might fall. She stacks magazines and this feels like the most that she can handle. She reads an article that makes her wonder how long it will take her to recover. Her grief has rendered her fragile and she recognizes the same feeling in the faces of her friends who have lost loved ones over the years.

While visiting her doctor, Didion begins to cry when he asks how she is doing. She tells the doctor that she “can’t see the upside in this” (170). The doctor, a close friend, laughs at her use of the phrase, thinking she means that she cannot “see the light at the end of the tunnel” (171). This is not, however, what she meant to say. Didion considers herself an optimist, able to see an advantage to every situation. She realizes that what she is really fighting against is self-pity.

She learns to reject the idea that she was ever lucky, remembering that Dunne had believed that all people eventually lose someone close—this was the inevitable balance of life. Didion’s lifelong adherence to the belief that there was such a thing as luck—and that she had plenty of it—left her unarmed to handle the death of her husband and the illness of her daughter.