Reviewed by Sabena Stark

            “This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.”

            Joan Didion has spent her life taking meaning from words, from their pulse and echo and placement. In her newest offering, The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion walks us through a trip into her most private hell: the sudden death of her husband along with the severe illness of her only child. It’s the kind of nightmare one could encounter in a time of war or plague. Not, as some might imagine, in the lives of a successful literary couple living in modern day Upper Eastside digs.

            The book begins as a tectonic shift in her world is set in motion, on what she tells us was an otherwise ordinary evening. Yet it wasn’t an ordinary evening. Didion and her husband had just left the hospital room where their daughter, Quintana, was still in a coma, a challenge for even the strongest parental heart.

            Along with her self-consciously futile attempts to control the world around her is Didion’s search for the meaning of her experience. She does all the things expected of a competent wife and mother. But Joan Didion the writer, the cynical examiner of the human condition, is not convinced of the verity of her crisis. It just doesn’t follow that one moment her husband of forty years is talking, salad fork in hand, and then, in a calamity of syringes and medical equipment, he is whisked away for all eternity. She looks for clues in literature and poetry, in the cold liturgy of science, even in the writings of Emily Post.

            When she finally confronts grief, she finds an old enemy has been waiting. “… the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is… the very absence of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

            This same foe haunted her in 1970, when she wrote “On the Morning After the Sixties.” “We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way …. of masking for a while that dread of the meaninglessness which was man's fate." 

            Again, in her 2003 book Where I Was From, Didion describes her mother’s mantra, “What difference does it make?” as the “five words that had come to chill me to the bone…”         

            We come to the crossroads where the reader might ask, along with the author, are the details of a life meaningless? Or do they form a pattern, tell a story, if we could only step back far enough to see the bigger picture. The starkness of death and the profundity of grief sit side by side as if passengers on a train in this journal of loss. And at the end of these tracks, the meaning we find is the inviolability, the sacredness of change itself. The author, like all of us, must learn to ride along.

            Robert Pinsky writes, in his October 9th New York Times review of The Year of Magical Thinking: “Repetition and observation narrate emotion by demonstrating it, so that restraint itself becomes poetic, even operatic.” Maybe. But not here. The choreographer of words doesn’t appear in her full form. Her heart is still too broken. What we get is an unvarnished dispatch from Didion’s visit to the land of pain. And for now, that has to be good enough.