The Year of Magical Thinking

“I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, showing you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant reads of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find meaning.”

Didion finds solace in words, language, and literature. She explains that writing is how she makes meaning of her experiences and the world around her. In the case of her husband’s death, however, it renders itself inadequate in helping her organize her thoughts.

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

Didion’s writing reflects the wave effect described in this quotation. She waivers between rationality and the overwhelming effects of grief which cloud her thinking. In one moment, she can be fine and go about her day as normal when she is suddenly triggered and overcome by the “waves, paroxysms, [and] sudden apprehensions” of her grief.

“I needed to be alone so he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.”

The theme The Power and Limitations of ‘Magical Thinking’ is central to the book, as in “magical thinking” certain rituals or actions are believed to exert power over the external world. Didion’s decision to stay alone the night after her husband’s death represents one in a string of manifestations of magical thinking, which will become a habit in the year following his death.