The Year Of Magical Thinking Analysis

Joan Didion is one of America’s iconic writers. In her powerful book, “The Year of Magical Thinking”, she portrays the story of how her only daughter Quintana, just days before Christmas in 2003, was taken ill, put in an induced coma and placed on life support. A matter of days later, her husband John, suffered a massive and fatal coronary. Didion asserts, “This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness ….. about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself” (pg 7, 2005). Research demonstrates that there is a higher risk for development of morbid or complicated grief when the death experienced is unexpected and the loss is sudden in nature. Potocky (1993) emphasises the risk is also increased with the presence of a concurrent life crisis at the time of the death. Lobb, et al.
She described her parents death as expected, “I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life” (Didion, pg. 27, 2005). The sudden loss of John, was an entirely different experience, one that placed her in a “high-risk group” for complicated grief (Potocky, 1993). Didion noted the “ordinary nature of everything preceding” some disasters. Didion (2005) in the days that followed John’s death, takes action to inform his brother of the death, something that had to be done, while simultaneously recognising that she herself wasn’t ready to fully accept the news, “there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible” (pg, 32). Also, the writing of an obituary which she avoided would have