The Year of Magical Thinking

Shortly after Quintana is released from UCLA, Didion travels to Boston for the Democratic National Convention to cover the event for The New York Review of Books. Didion does not anticipate that this trip will be loaded with pitfalls, as she has spent little time in Boston in the past and rarely with Dunne or Quintana. Yet Didion still experiences the mobility of memory: Although what she is doing is, for her, entirely novel, she is triggered into thinking about Quintana’s wedding and Dunne giving a toast. While at the convention in the Fleet Center, Didion panics and leaves.

To regain composure, Didion spends the rest of her trip trying to think about an earlier visit to Boston in 1955, before Dunne and Quintana. Each fuzzy memory leads her back to her husband and daughter. She worries that she will never again be able to visit the places she loves, because even Boston—a place which held no emotional value for her—carries her back into darkness.

An article about Stephen Hawking strikes a chord with Didion. Hawking announced that he had reversed his thinking of a previous argument that any information that enters a black hole cannot be retrieved. Hawking’s statement bolstered a component of modern physics which states that time can always be reversed. As Didion travels through memories with Dunne while visiting the Republican National Convention, she realizes that she has experienced these memories without needing to change them. It is only in the last year after Dunne’s death that she felt the need to alter the course of time.

Before he died, Dunne had told Didion that they needed to have more fun together. She knew he was referring, in one manner or another, to a couple they had met in Indonesia in the 1980s. This couple had been warm, well-traveled, and affectionate. Didion recalls an openness to her and Dunne’s interactions with the pair. Dunne had spoken about them often after they parted ways. He saw them as what he believed he and Didion should be.

While going through Dunne’s files, Didion discovers a document titled, “AAA Random Thoughts” (186). She finds the name of the couple in the document and realizes that Dunne had edited the document on the afternoon of his death. Her mind is filled with questions about Dunne’s feelings about the couple, about the kind of life he may have wanted and how he felt regarding the life he had.

Didion views grief as a destination, one which the traveler will not recognize until they have come upon it. All the anxieties about grief or a funeral or being able to handle it are immaterial; the reality of grief is starkly different from what someone may imagine it to be. Grief, Didion claims, is filled with meaninglessness.

Didion’s experiences with meaning are rooted in her fundamental belief in the Episcopal litany: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end” (189-190). This concept brought her comfort as a child. When she married Dunne, she found meaning in their everyday routines, the cycles of daily life. Didion views both philosophies as two systems of meaning that might one day converge. She imagines living once more in California with Dunne in a home that has now been destroyed by a landslide. She daydreams that this may have been one way in which they both could have died and both philosophies could have met at one point: the never-ending cycle of the world and the everyday.

Didion worries about succumbing to self-pity, but she also recognizes that self-pity may be an important part of the grieving process. She and Dunne lived and worked from home the entire forty years of their marriage. She recalls the countless times she found him in the house to tell him things, even the mundane changes found in the neighborhood. After he died, Didion is left without the person with whom she shared everything. Noticing the leaves changing on a walk home leaves her desperate to share her observation with Dunne. Yet, he is not there, and she is met with only silence. Although she can use her skills as a writer to imagine what Dunne might say, this feels like a betrayal. She is alone. Because of this, Didion suggests that she is left with no one else to focus on but herself—a state that lends itself perfectly to self-pity.