CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY SAN MARCOS
THESIS SIGNATURE PAGE
THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
MASTER OF ARTS
IN
LITERATURE AND WRITING STUDIES
THESIS TITLE: C g He e f: J a D d a d e A f P b c Be ea e e
AUTHOR: Mikayla Keehn
DATE OF SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE: April 17th, 2020
THE THESIS HAS BEEN ACCEPTED BY THE THESIS COMMITTEE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN LITERATURE AND WRITING STUDIES.
04 1 2020 Dr. Martha Stoddard-Holmes THESIS COMMITTEE CHAIR SIGNATURE DATE
04 24 2020 Dr. Oliver Berghof THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER SIGNATURE DATE
04 24 2020 Professor Sandra Doller Sandra Doller Apr 24, 2020 THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER SIGNATURE DATE
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Composing Herself: Joan Didion and the Art of Public Bereavement
Mikayla Keehn
Thesis Chair: Professor Martha Stoddard-Holmes
Thesis Committee: Professor Oliver Berghof
Professor Sandra Doller
2
Table of Contents
Introduction
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..3-15
Chapter One: Translating Grief and Mourning: Joan Didion and the Juxtaposition of the Private and
Public
I. Joan Didion’s Motive and the Writing Process ………………………………………………… 17-20
II. Reaching Past Grief to Translate Mourning Back into Grief………………………..……20-29
III. Comparison of The Year of Magical Thinking to Blue Nights: Universal Grieving to
Inexplicable Melancholy………………………………………………………………………………….29-35
IV. Didion’s Private and Public Translation of Grief in The Year of Magical Thinking…….35-40
Chapter Two: Joan Didion’s "Vortex Effect": A Liminal Translation of Illuminated Grief,
Bereavement, and Dismissal of Sentimentality.
I. Liminality in Didion’s Enlightened Grief Translation— The “Vortex Effect” 40-51
II. Translating Sentimentality Amidst Mourning and Grief 51-55
III. Translating “Magical Thinking” and Finding Resolution in Grief 55-60
Epilogue: Translating My Life Alongside Joan Didion:
61-70
Works Cited
71-75
End Notes
76
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Introduction
“Imagine you’re remembering.”
Joan Didion, Where I was From.
I remember being in high school, twelfth grade English class, sitting across the table from
elitist A.P. students destined to become the reincarnation of Ernest Hemingway, but who honestly
rely on SparkNotes for their brilliant musings on the day’s reading. My hands are trickling with sweat. I am a senior in high school, and for as long as I can remember, I have had a unique fascination with books and language. I think of myself as creative— I was praised for reading the words of Anne Lamott, Linda Hogan, and Billy Collins and writing wonderful poems about cats in the sweet-smelling hay and feathers floating down from the sky.
Why am I nervous in what should be the class I excel in? My teacher is nearing retirement, and it seems like every ounce of her patience had been spent twenty years prior, so every class feels reminiscent of a horror film, none of us knowing who she was going to pick out next. I had been cast as her victim before— for not having my pen and paper out even though none of my classmates had theirs out either. It wasn’t those silly but mortifying experiences that broke my spirit— it was the day when she read the first paragraph of my rhetorical analysis essay on Sylvia
Plath’s poem, “The Spinster.” She held the paper in front of her face, made her scrunched forehead signal, and I knew I was doomed.
“Okay-- okay. This is all wrong. Why, why, why would you use “I” in the first paragraph of an academic
essay?! That is just wrong and will get you nowhere in a real college classroom,” she spat as she slammed my paper down on my desk. 4
After that comment, I sank down in my seat and the remaining part of my brain that told me I was creative and special shut off and I told myself again and again how stupid I was. Of course, nobody wants a personal anecdote before I delve into my analysis of Plath. My words merely existed for the purpose of pleasing the politics of academia and lost their poignancy once I stepped out the brass doors.
When I was a new college student, entering community college, I felt apprehensive about
my introductory writing class (because it’s probably not shocking that I did not take the A.P test). In the first class session, my professor encouraged us to think about how we feel in a writing classroom when an assignment is handed out. We had an open, light discussion about notions that our previous English teachers and classmates had imposed on us that discouraged our creativity. I worked up the nerve to talk about my experience the year prior, to which my teacher apologized on behalf of my former instructor and taught me that in writing an academic essay, in a real college classroom, it is important to consider our own stories in relation to the texts we are reading. From there, we can see connections in the story that relate to different rhetorical devices. Just because we are entering academic territory it does not mean that we negate our own experiences and stories in place of another writer’s.
When I entered university, I started to explore genres of writing that I used to see as unattainable for my measly intellect. In the first semester of my upper division courses, I started my own creative writing project where I would blog about situations that had happened in my life-- some humorous, some not so much. It wasn't until my senior year in my upper division non-fiction creative writing course that I fully grasped what memoir was to me-- it became more than a leisurely project and more of a philosophical conundrum. I decided I wanted to see the connections 5
between my notions of the genre unraveled in philosophy and criticism. To me, a memoir is a purposefully crafted narrative where the author delves deep into their memory and interweaves their story with other forms of memory— whether it be their own or other’s. Often through extensive investigation and contemplation, the “finished” text is scrutinized for validity. What truth are we searching for, however? Are we searching for a universal sense of truth to apply to our own lives? Perhaps by imposing ourselves onto someone else’s narrative, we are in turn investing ourselves in the author’s life.
Literature Review/ Critical Landscape
I. Definitions of Memoir
Various critics define memoir alongside terms such as “life writing,” “personal narrative,”
and “autobiography” to examine the nuanced differences between each type of writing while
interrogating the continually growing field of memoir writing.
An important critic in the realm of autobiographical studies, Thomas Couser, in Memoir: An
Introduction, clearly differentiates memoir and autobiography as well as autobiography and life
writing. Life writing signifies a time in America’s early development where early settlers recorded
their journeys, often with future generations in mind. Autobiography is frequently written by an
individual who is approaching or near the end of their life in to preserve their story for their
posterity or the public. Memoir emerges as a gateway for the ordinary person to find value and
purpose to tell their story.
To pinpoint various areas of memoir’s development, Ben Yagoda, in his foundational text
Memoir: A History, provides a detailed log of early, foundational memoir across the globe and from
there transitions into describing more contemporary memoirists and their works. Yagoda displays 6 a clear connection between memoirs and their cultural and historical contexts—further validating the essential task of detailing personal history. Yagoda also chronicles instances of some memoirs found to be fraudulent in content, where writers intentionally stretch the truth to sell more copies.
He discusses how through their reception, the consequences those untruthful texts project onto the otherwise enriching genre of memoir. By defining and outlining what memoir is in practice,
Yagoda provides a rich critical landscape for analyzing contemporary memoir.
While some critics like Couser and Yagoda provide poignant definitions and accurate pinpoints of memoir’s developments, scholars such as James Olney depict how memoir functions within the writer’s sense of self. In Memory and Narrative, particularly in chapter five, “Memory,”
Olney examines memoir through the lens of psychoanalytic criticism to discuss the unreliable nature of memory to provide absolute “truth.” Olney subverts the suspicion of memoir’s validity as a true art form and argues that its willingness to be subjective proves its necessity in literary studies. Olney alludes to memoir as a beautiful and lonely paradox, where the writer is left alone with only their memories to craft a story. His notion of the solitary writer alleviates some of the distrust common within memoir’s readership and paves the way for writers to feel empowered to tell their stories the way they feel most comfortable.
II. Women’s Memoir and Criticism of Women’s Memoir
To reach further into the value of reading and writing contemporary memoir in North
America, Mary Karr discusses how she positions herself as a female memoirist and applies her knowledge of memoir to teaching and life practices. In The Art of Memoir, Karr discusses briefly how memoir has developed into a booming genre in literary studies but primarily develops a text of metacognition where she interweaves pieces of her own memoir with anecdotes about 7 memoir’s application in the classroom and in self-care. Karr emphasizes the importance that lies in writing about the self, particularly in the classroom where first-person writing is frowned upon as
“non-academic.” Her emphasis on the self also translates into her experience in therapy, where she sees an imperative to deeply examine the self to uncover important discoveries that foster self- growth. To highlight prominent, grounding voices in the field of memoir, Karr shines a light on
Maxine Hong Kinston’s memoir Woman Warrior in Chapter 11: “The Visionary Maxine Hong
Kingston.” Karr discusses how memoirs are a “true” art form especially when they showcase women in characteristics and spaces that they do not typically “embody.” (113) Karr urges memoirists, particularly female memoirists to represent their lives in whichever fashion feels the most truthful to their experience. Karr’s description of memoir as a “true” art form creates a space for critical voices, particularly in the feminist realm, to emerge and join and feel valued in conversation within literary studies.
To provide a diverse voice for the growth of women’s memoir, Maggie Nelson redefines what memoir can become. In her eclectic text The Argonauts, Nelson integrates personal narrative and critical theory to break ground in “auto theory,” a term created by Lauren Fournier. In 2006
Fournier in her dissertation introduces auto theory, which remains a relatively new field in literary studies, where the writer reflexively sways between criticism and life writing. Maggie Nelson explores spaces of identity, sexuality, and grief in her memoir and utilizes critical theory to enrich her writing. She writes about her unconventional marriage to a non-binary1 individual and utilizes queer theory to disrupt the normative love or marriage story while she provides her own amalgamation of personal narrative (memoir) and critical theory to offer a verisimilitude of authenticity to her story. 8
Examining places of contention within notions of truth between memoir and critical theory and truths claims between specific authors, scholar Sarah Heston discusses why the two genres should be seen with synergy. Heston chronologically investigates both sides to memoir and auto- biography’s contention with critical theory. On one end of the spectrum is Paul de Man’s idea that auto-biography (memoir) is essentially impossible because there is no way to represent experience or memory “accurately” due to its subjective nature. In contrast, she examines James Olney’s idea that truth does not need to be seen the same as “fact”— only through that realization can memoir reach the same level of respect as fields of critical theory. After adumbrating the historical development of memoir’s reception in literary studies, Heston brings forth the term “critical memoir.” She uses this term to provide a bridge between the idea of “knowing and experiencing” when reading a memoir. She argues through her subjective opinion that the most effective memoirs2 incorporate remnants of critical theory and in turn break the codes of what the genre can become in its investigation of the self.
Where Heston negotiates territory of possibility in memoir’s development and reception, feminist critic Judith Taylor examines the importance of women’s memoir as moving away from a collective consciousness formed by women’s or “feminist” movements. Her examination of memoir as “movement” suggests a forward motion and opens the genre to new possibilities in terms of validity in its art form. The individual’s personal experience outweighs collective feminist theories and expands the possibility of what feminist memoir can mean. Whether that means an expansion in possible topics that are not gendered in definition, or an expansion on how those topics can be written about, Taylor highlights the importance of change within the genre of memoir. 9
In a later work, Taylor examines memoir as a channel through which to be heard and not necessarily as a method to change gendered social methodology, where women are seen as able to write only about certain territories. The writer-based methodology she embraces gives way to non-normative women’s texts relating to race and socio-economic status to be considered as enlightening examples of memoir. Her use of “rich sensitivities” speaks to her idea of women’s experiences being categorized as important rather than being dismissed as merely sentimental or overly emotional. Writing memoir is an extremely emotional process as it requires the writer to dive deep into memory. To be categorized as overly sensitive or sentimental can be a fine line for women memoirists to cross, especially when writing about something like grief. Taylor is responding and calling for growth in women’s memoir and in turn, she is rejecting the limits of women’s memoir content based on “rich sensitivities.” Through her examination of gendered notions of “sensitivit[y]”, she reveals that when writing about emotionally charged subjects such as grief, it becomes almost impossible to avoid the sentimental.
III. Defining the Implications of Women’s Grief Memoir
Women’s memoir has attracted a critical eye due to the limited content that is seen as
“acceptable” (Rustin) in their expected embodied spaces. Scholars such as Julia Rak and Susanna
Rustin have extrapolated various threads of gendered discourse that seem to inhibit female memoirists from producing work that is “unexpected” (Rustin)— meaning to produce work that is focused on another aspect of a woman’s life aside from marriage or motherhood. Since memoirs are an invitation into the author’s “private” (Rak) life, memoirs written by women are often looked at more critically due to the “critique of public men” (311). Rak and Rustin challenge deeming 10 women’s memoir as “confessional” or “sentimental” because the emphasis that gets placed onto their work is tied to emotion, distracting from the intellectual richness of their content.
Women’s memoir has been criticized by some critics for being overly emotional or sentimental. On the other hand, other contemporary critics and academics have examined the genre of memoir through the trust and distrust within its readership. The purpose behind writing memoir, especially in the last ten years, has become a significant conversation in literary outlets as a normalization of “self-help culture” (Taylor). By normalizing the act of sharing stories in a collective sense, grief memoir becomes more publicly accepted and comfortable.
In writing about grief in memoir, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson discuss the progression of the grief narrative in memoir in their book In the Wake of the Memoir Boom. They also describe the boost in memoir’s progression of acceptable content in north America with its “diverse methods of storytelling.” They describe the various forms of memoir as sharing a mutual space like a “modern day bildungsroman” where writers collectively share experiences to normalize certain territories such as grief and tragedy. Smith and Watson go on to explain how memoir about grief can be seen as “auto-thanatography” where the author mourns the deceased and the loss of self in the process.
The author of a grief memoir partakes in a unique sense of vulnerability that can offer consolation for their readership, but which also causes great pain for the writer. Memoirs written about mourning on the other hand usually serve to console a group of people who were afflicted by a collective tragedy, such as 9/11.
In the first chapter of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explicates her motivation for writing as writing for herself, rather than writing for an audience in mind. While her subject matter is solemn, she writes about her tragedy with an avoidance of purposeful sentimentality—where 11 some authors have been criticized for cheapening emotion. She instead explores her mourning and grief as a way for her own understanding of experience.
Female memoirists who create texts, whether intentionally or not, that act as a contrast to the criticized, overbred self-help book style of memoir prose, are individuals such as Joan Didion, writer of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Her works have been praised and criticized for their intense vulnerability and candid raw prose. Through her liminal projection of grief and mourning, Didion has provided a new landscape for female memoirists to avoid criticism of becoming overly sentimental when writing about the grieving process.
Primary Thesis Research Questions
My primary research questions are: How does a writer of memoir translate grief? How does a female memoirist enter the field of grief memoir without being categorized as “sentimental” or
“overly emotional”? What specific modes and styles does Joan Didion employ to intentionally dismiss notions of sentimentality that female memoirists are often criticized for embodying?
Chapter Breakdown
I. In my first chapter, “Translating Grief and Mourning”: Joan Didion and the Juxtaposition of the
Private and Public,” I briefly explore Didion’s motive for writing and then discuss in depth how her investigation into the self translates into her ability to work past initial grief, into mourning, and then back into an enlightened state of grief that propels her into writing. To accurately examine the scope of her writing motive and processes, I reference back to her essay “Why I Write,” published in 1976, where she states that she writes to discover herself— what she thinks and feels.
Using her articulations of self and identity, I carry the idea of composing into the first chapter. I look at the ways in which she works past writer’s block in the initial stages of grieving her husband’s 12 death, and I find that once she develops momentum from coping strategies developed in mourning, she takes off into new areas of enlightenment in grief.
To show the contrast between a grief memoir such as The Year of Magical Thinking, I include a section where I examine the reception of her final memoir Blue Nights as a mourning narrative, where she does not gain momentum to move into grief, when she continuously mourns the loss of her daughter Quintana. The reception of Blue Nights as troubling or disturbing is in great contrast to the reception of The Year of Magical Thinking, widely renowned as a celebrated, unifying grief narrative. The untouchable territory of Blue Nights provides a poignant comparison to Didion’s translation of grief in her earlier work.
Jumping back to The Year of Magical Thinking, I utilize Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” and “The Storyteller” to delve into notions of Didion’s translation of memory into writing. Since Didion writes to know what she herself thinks and how she herself feels, I see a direct correlation to her need to create a new type of grief memoir because she finds insufficient the literature she read previously. Her “task” becomes to reach past the mourning induced writer’s block and finally reach a space of enlightened understanding as she works through her “year of magical thinking” within the paradox of “public bereavement.”
II. In my second chapter, I hone in on Didion’s presentation of the “vortex effect” as a liminal space of enlightenment that allows her to analytically explore her illuminated grief and eventually come to points of acceptance in the process. The “vortex effect” is expressed as an inevitable push and pull of memory and becomes so powerful that Didion gets lost in its power. She expresses her experience in the “vortex effect” in a fragmented mode of analysis, memory, and prose as she experiences and uses it to navigate her readers through the pangs of lasting grief. She arrives at 13
the consensus that grief does not entail a finite amount of time, and her experience in the throes of
grief into mourning provides her with painful but cultivated understanding of her process. I utilize
Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking my Library” and “The Task of the Translator” to further
discuss the modes in which I believe Didion actively writes and translates her grief and mourning to
dismiss sentimentality in her writing— a criticism of primarily female written memoirs. Whether
she set out with the intention or not, I view Didion’s memoir as not displaying the sentimental in
the form of cheapening emotion— she instead provides a ground breaking, critically acclaimed
landscape for what the grief memoir can be.
III. In my epilogue, I introduce myself and my relationship to The Year of Magical Thinking. Since I
have been a subject of memoir in my mother’s chapbook Not a Leg to Stand On and read Didion’s
memoir when I was a child and as an adult experiencing grief, I have a unique and special
connection to her work. I also introduce my own, short memoir as a direct reaction to my reflection
and analytic investigation into Didion’s memoir.
Didion’s Background: Progression from Journalist to Memoirist:
Joan Didion has often been called the “invisible reporter.”3 She spent the 1960’s reporting
about the changing culture of California cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco—entering territory that was often uncomfortable and upsetting.4As a renowned journalist earlier and later in her career, Didion set out to find truthful narratives, particularly in politics. Her work shifted in the late 1960’s to a different form of text wherein her essay writing started to incorporate more personal narrative. She emerged as a memoirist, hinting at memoir in Slouching Towards
Bethlehem and shortly after with Miami and The White Album. With these texts, she infused her narrative with journalist gems she encountered along the way. Some critics perceived her method 14
as unconventional, but her reflexive ability to write in different forms and piece her work together strengthened her “allure” (Diamond) for readers. Still, Didion kept her journalist expertise close at hand as she covered “urgent political events” and used memoir (personal narrative) to display her
disgust with contemporary political and social acts and legislations. Didion’s resistance to write
“simple news stories” (Muggli 407) sets her apart from others in her career and makes her writing
enjoyable to a large readership—due to her ability to write objectively as a journalist and
subjectively as a burgeoning memoirist.
While some critics in Didion’s time as a journalist such as Joe Klein found her more
politically-based texts like Slouching Towards Bethlehem to have “political naivete” (Brockes), she
continued her efforts to uncover truthful narratives in the corrupt environment of politics and government. In 1988, to highlight truthful political narratives, she removed her subjective opinion in one piece written shortly before the election, and simply highlighted words from President Bill
Clinton wherein he states, “If we can change the world we can change America” (Diamond). By quoting Bill Clinton, Didion is opening the boundaries of political discourse by focusing on
“change,” the individual’s ability to enrich the world through discourse, and she hints at a bridge between the personal and political. Didion in turn segues from overwhelming political narratives
that incite particular ideologies, and instead she begs her readers to draw their own meaning in the jumbled world of politics. She writes objectively as an effective journalist does, but she also incorporates subjectivity by entering the first-person in many pieces of work. Didion does not do the work for her readers, but instead she gives facts and vivid details, inviting readers in to examine her mind at their own will. 15
Connecting closer with her readers, Joan Didion has been interviewed and documented closely by many fellow writers. Although many writers have chronicled detailed stories about Joan
Didion5, Tracy Daughtery’s celebrated biography The Last Love Song provides an intimate look at
Didion’s upbringing and how her family helped foster her writer’s nature. In one particularly enlightening passage in his biography, Daughtery states, “If Didion’s memory is correct, her
mother seems to have planted the idea in her daughter’s mind that she was too delicate and sensitive for her own good, in the manner of all the family women” (Daum). Although Didion’s mother did plant the gendered notion that sensitivity clouds judgement, her mother also taught her the value of channeling her emotion into a journal, thus starting Didion’s journey to become a renowned and wide-reaching writer and critic. Through her ability to vividly journal emotion, especially while writing about subjects like mourning and grief, Didion solidifies her expertise as a journalist, writer, and critical thinker. Writing a text such as The Year Of Magical Thinking requires a
great deal of reflection, bravery, and sacrifice. Didion masterfully accomplishes all three.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion uses vivid imagery of her husband and daughter, stark metaphors of time and place to illustrate her thought process, and a philosophical tone to describe and translate her grieving process. Didion’s exploration of time and place proves essential in her process of grieving her husband and the impending loss of her daughter. As she translates what grief is to her, she starts to develop a sense of resilience that propels her forward— disregarding notions of sentimentality along the way.
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Chapter One: Translating Grief and Mourning: Joan Didion and the Juxtaposition of the Private and
Public
“We forget all too soon the things we
thought we could never forget.”
-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
When language fails, and meaning is rendered lost, Joan Didion breaks the veil of
bereavement and publishes The Year of Magical Thinking in 2005, just a year after her husband John
Gregory Dunne suddenly passed away. Didion shifts away from her previous work, in primarily
investigative journalism, and in 2005 brings forth a contemporary and timeless amalgamation of
her mindset through mourning, grieving, and bereavement in the year following John’s passing6.
As a celebrated public figure, Joan Didion has written various essays chronicling her writing processes7, and part of her process details the struggle to write amidst extenuating circumstances where meaning starts to decline in its richness. Didion’s writing of The Year of Magical Thinking in
2005 was motivated by her ability and desire to translate and understand the process of her grief
and to investigate how the various mental and physical manifestations of grief impeded and strengthened her ability to prevail the year following John’s death. Didion utilizes her knowledge as a journalist to delve into memoir, both in the realm of the genre and her experience and is candid
about the false starts—the writer’s block she incurred when crafting an indelible grief narrative. In
the first ten chapters of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion translates her indelible memories
into text and provides a definitive shift into grief as she displays her initial mourning stage. As she
defines “magical thinking” (33) and depicts negotiating feelings of abandonment and denial, she
guides her readers into her candid progression into grief, utilizing literature, research, and her 17
writing process to make sense of her identity as a new widow traversing the unfamiliar landscape
of bereavement. Didion elucidates the paradoxical push and pull of the public aspects of her life as they interfere with her private writing of her memoir. By doing so, she proves her independence as a writer whose deeply personal memoir became universally celebrated and translated, in various modes such as a Broadway stage production8.
I. Joan Didion’s Motive and Writing Process
To divulge her inability to fully comprehend the gravity of John’s death, Joan Didion opens
The Year of Magical Thinking with the notion of how she struggled to admit her loss and move past
writer’s block before reconnecting with her writing potential. She writes:
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity (3)
Didion tells us that those four lines were written a day or two after John died, and she made no
changes to the file until May 20, 2004, four months after (3). By displaying and scrutinizing the
words she could not move past, Didion delves right into her initial inability to translate or even begin to process her feelings of mourning, grief, and bereavement. Didion’s reposition of “life” in the first two lines draws a delineation between the life she still has, and the sudden loss of the life
John had. Her use of “you” in the third line invites the reader into the narrative, making her quandary very personal as she tries to make sense of the trauma.
She subsequently tells her readers, “[a]t some point, in the interest of remembering what
seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, ‘the ordinary 18
instant’” (3-4). Through her addition to the first words she could utter, she starts to produce her
narrative. And in the addition to her first typed words, she begins to uncover how in tragic
circumstances, “ordinary” details or happenings become the forefront of the mind. Didion starts to
unravel what was “ordinary” on the day of John’s death later in the chapter as she describes in
scrutinizing detail the events of his death.
Didion connects her motivation to understand her thinking process in The Year of Magical
Thinking to her quest to uncover truth in memory. Her essay “Why I Write,” published in 1976,
reveals her motive to understand how writing informs her thought process. Didion in turn
examines the intimacy of her mindset to her work and explicitly displays her motive to write. She
confesses, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it
means. What I want and what I fear” (2). Didion describes herself as a concrete critical thinker, but
she defines herself as a writer rather than an “intellectual” because she is not primarily interested in
other people’s arguments and ideas but is fascinated by images, the translation of images into
ideas, and the transcription of ideas onto paper.
“Why I Write” further develops Didion’s differentiation not as an “intellectual” but as a
writer as she claims her goal to “try to locate […] the shimmer, the grammar of the picture” (3).
Although she does not self-identify under the demarcations of a “scholar,” her attention to the
“shimmer, the grammar” portrays a keen sense of intellectual curiosity that is evident in her ability
to translate and transcribe her senses into a coherent and cohesive document9.
Didion further adumbrates her motive for writing using the first person “I” in various forms,
merging her artistic mindset with the objectivity she has as a journalist. Didion hints at the bridge between the personal and the political aspects of her work as she chose the title “Why I Write” 19
because of the “I, I, I” sound. Each word— “Why” “I” “Write”—echoes the assonance of “I,” and thus
the self, the writer. Didion has always carried a hint of the personal in her writing. Even when she
defined herself as an investigative journalist from 1960 until the late 1980’s, she incorporated
subjective remnants of personal narrative in essays such as “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as she
described what she saw as well as how she felt. While some saw her nuanced style of journalism as
revolutionary, other critics and journalists found her to have “political naivety.” (Brockes) Although
Didion did not publish The Year of Magical Thinking until 2005, she incorporated elements of personal narrative and life writing into her work long before.
By concretizing her motivation to write, Didion creates a dialogue between herself as the
writer and her readers. Didion describes early in “Why I Write” the attention she has towards her
audience’s sensibilities by stating that the first person creates “an imposition of the writer’s
sensibility on the reader’s most private space” (1). By uncovering the vulnerability that exists
between the reader and writer, she exposes how she realizes her invasion into her “reader’s most
private space.” She instead uses the first person in tandem with critical research and reading
perhaps to bridge a stable gap between the trust of the reader and the exposed writer. Joan Didion
examines various contradictions between the private and public realms in The Year of Magical
Thinking as she attempts to balance her private bereavement with the public nature of writing a
best-selling memoir.
II. Reaching Past Grief to Translate Mourning Back into Grief
Although Joan Didion does not classify herself as a “scholar” (“Why I Write”), she is cognizant of how she discovers nuances in imagery. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion describes seemingly insignificant images that are essential in her mourning process, such as the 20
exact cards that were in John’s wallet the night he died (17). An adherence to small details is
integral in Didion’s memoir since she seems to use details to make sense of the unfamiliar nature
of sudden mourning.
While Didion does not explicitly define her initial shock of experiencing the publicness of
John’s death as “grief” or “mourning,” the steps she takes to gain composure are representative of the “coping efforts” (Rando) defined by experts in the field of psychotherapy. While the terms
“grief” and “mourning” seem to be tightly intertwined, they contain nuances in their prevalence within the individual’s experience. Therese Rando, the clinical director of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Loss lists grief as the first category where the individual acknowledges their loss
and begins to process their experience. Rando lists mourning after grief and describes it as the
period of internalized processing that entails the development of strategies to re-center the self
after tragedy hits.
Although Rando’s description of grief and mourning seem logical, I see Didion’s representation of the stages within The Year of Magical Thinking as taking a different trajectory.
Didion’s initial acknowledgement of loss as represented by her first printed words, “Life changes
fast...” (3) articulates her first glimpse of grief. She starts to examine herself through the
“psychological, behavioral, social, and physical reactions” (Rando) she has to grief. As she gains the
emotional composure to acknowledge John’s death in a public form, she enters mourning, where
she develops strategies to re-center herself. After she moves past the public aspect of mourning,
she moves into a space of intellectual composure where she transitions back into grief and uses the
“process of [her] experience]” to write as she realizes that grief is a space she will embody forever. 21
Didion’s initial inability to write about the swirling, inordinate details of the days, weeks,
months following John’s passing displays her powerlessness in grief. She says on page four, “I
recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred.” Didion starts to
recover succinct details about the day John died and the events of the days after.
In the first chapter of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion sets up the idea of the “ordinary” to illuminate the universality of loss and grief, leading her to become the narrator of her story.
Didion has been praised for the “poetic” (Muggli) qualities in her writing and her fluctuating degrees of description in recounting memory that cause readers to hold onto some images more concretely than others. At first glance, her sharp descriptions of seemingly insignificant details may seem intense, but through further examination point to her style. However, she begins to obsess over certain images such as John’s shoes (22), signifying her inability to recognize his death.
Through her denial and obsession, she is working through the initial stages of grief. According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), to process a traumatic event, sometimes our brains hold onto details that seem insignificant in the moment but prove integral in the mourning and grieving processes. Psychologists call this phenomenon “excessive intellectualization” (NIH) wherein people obsess over details to disassociate from the trauma. When tragedy occurs, it makes sense that our brains hold onto minute details to avoid becoming overwhelmed with the strong impending emotions that will soon become suffocating. Joan Didion reveals that holding onto certain
memories such as John’s notecards (22) prove useful in finding resolution once she has reached the end of her year of “magical thinking,” but in her initial shock and grief, images such as his 22
notecards haunt her. The obsession over certain images illustrates her attempts to disassociate from the fullness of the tragedy.
While at some points Didion does seem to avidly disassociate from the trauma, she also
engulfs herself into the world of literature and medical journals to find truth, validation and
resolution. After reviewing literature on grief and mourning, Didion is unsatisfied and reminds her readers that the attempt to discover feeling through language is a great task and speaks to the imperative felt by the writer to produce their own work. In chapter four, Didion reveals that “in time of trouble, [she] had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.
Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably sparse (44).” Although Didion remarks that she found great enjoyment in reading C.S Lewis’s grief narrative A Grief Observed and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for the poetic qualities of their grief, she also found their descriptions of grieving to be “abstracted representations” (45) and not indicative of her process. Joan Didion reveals her imperative to create her own kind of grief and mourning narrative because the work she finds is sparse and not enough to filter her new emotions (45). In turn, Didion becomes the translator of her own grief
once she reaches past mourning the loss of John and creates The Year of Magical Thinking as a
reaction to her need to understand. Her drive to create a work for her own process is reminiscent
of Walter Benjamin’s description of the translator in his essay, “The Task of the Translator.” He
describes the quest of the translator onto its subject and the various factors and ideologies that are
brought forth in the translation and transcription processes. 23
While I cannot claim that Didion was cognizant of Benjamin’s work in translation theory, I observe that she is engaging in a literal translation10 in the beginning of The Year of Magical
Thinking when she has written down the first four lines the day following John’s death. After that
p0int, when she is unable to write for four months, but is processing her emotions and memories, and she is engaging in a metaphorical translation11 as she is negotiating meaning and language to
gain the composure to move forward in her writing process. Her translation does not follow the
trajectory of translating one language into another, but it requires her to translate her memories
into a meaningful format to enhance her healing. In her grief, Didion’s attention and “excessive
intellectualization”12 over details and her adherence to their purpose in her narrative is relevant to
Benjamin’s notion of the translated text. Benjamin states:
Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language
forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at
the single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the
work in the alien one. (76)
When Benjamin differentiates “translation” from “a work of literature,” he is demonstrating the
complexity that lies in creating a text which requires layers of translation and transcription. His
notion of the “center of the language” represents the paradox of Joan Didion’s memoir writing
process as she translates convoluted memory into perceivable language. In her Paris Review
interview in the “Art of Non-Fiction” issue in 2006, she was asked if she engaged in the same
retyping in The Year of Magical Thinking that she expressed she did in previous pieces. She
responded, “I did. It was especially important with this book because so much of it depended on 24
echo. I wrote it in three months, but I marked it up every night.” She expresses Benjamin’s notion of
the “alien language” when she struggles to reach past the first four lines of her memoir for four months following his passing. “The reverberation” and the “echo” only started to protrude once she was able to express the inexpressible nature of grief and mourning.
Benjamin’s description of “the single spot” is reminiscent of Didion’s attention to details in her process of metacognitive translation. She must make sense of the seemingly “abstract” (45) circumstances or objects once she has made it past the mark of the initial trauma shock waves.
Didion often references back to the image of John’s notecards— he would often write down notes about his writing when they were out and return to the ideas later. One particular note seems to haunt Didion. At first it seems insignificant until she realizes the notecard was a premonition for future misfortune. She remembers that John had asked her to write down an idea for a new book and told her, “You can use it if you want to.” (23) Didion questions, “Did he know he wouldn’t write the book? [. . .] Was something telling him that night that the time for being able to write was running out?” (23-24). John’s notecards are a representation of lost potential in writing and a symbol of their relationship as writers together. Her metacognitive crises often stem from her loss of a writing partner, his notecards serving as a symbol of that loss. The inconsequential nature of the content in his final notecard serves as the “echo” that fuels her forward into her translation into
“abstract” reflections of grief and mourning.
Didion’s attention to small details is essential when she discusses the removal of the self in
periods of mourning. At the beginning of chapter three, she opens with: “The power of grief to
derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted (34).” By starting with that statement, she 25
sets up the idea that she is investigative into her mourner’s consciousness: although she finds grief
literature to be too “abstract” (45), she finds a balance and reads a variety of texts to understand
the logistics behind her flurrying thought processes. On page 44, Didion sets up the idea of research as integral to her understanding and “control” (44) of her perplexing emotions. Didion establishes credibility and references literature as well as psychoanalytic critics and medical journals to understand the subtle yet essential differences between mourning and grief to more accurately understand her thinking process. Didion researches and quotes from Sigmund Freud’s text “Mourning and Melancholia” and Melanie Klein’s “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic
Depressive States” to examine the often overlooked or unknown difference between grief and mourning, so she can regain the momentum to write about her own progression.
To gain a deeper understanding and make sense of her grief passing into mourning, Didion often references the processes as “condition(s)” (34). The implication of the classification is that of
illness since she starts to realize her thought process was irrational and skewed in the first months
after John died. Didion begins to reflectively examine her grieving process through a
psychoanalytic lens by quoting Freud’s analysis of grief and mourning: “‘It never occurs to us to
regard [grief] as a pathological condition and refer to it medical treatment’” (35). According to
Didion, Freud’s description of grief implies that the medical consensus of grief treats it like an
illness—an illness that takes a certain amount of time to get over and that any disruption of the
grieving process will degrade the individual’s ability to reach that place of solace. Didion enters in and later states, “Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and obliterate the dailiness of life” (27). Didion agrees with 26
Freud and psychologist Eric Lindemann and conflates their research that grief is a process and
degradation of the mind with that of her spirit.
In her reflection, she starts to see how grief does not take a finite amount of time to get
over, as Freud discussed in his examination of mourning and grief. Didion concludes her first
section of chapter three, rich with analytic research, and states, “Notice the stress on ‘overcoming’
it.” (35) Didion comes to learn through Freud’s analysis of mourning and grief that both periods are
often treated as “pathological conditions” (35) that insinuate that an individual can take certain
steps to move past and recover. As Didion combs through more research, she starts to resolve that
the grieving process is a lasting feeling that does not fully cease (35). She later returns to this notion at the end of her memoir when she finds resolution and forms acceptance in her thinking.
After Didion gains a more stable grounding into defining grief, Didion looks to Melanie
Klein, who describes the mourning process as “‘a moderate or transitory manic-depressive state
and overcomes it’” (34). By juxtaposing two theorists and finding agreement in both of their descriptions, Didion is showing her audience that through deductive thinking and critical attention, the mind can reflectively analyze different reactions to tragedy and compartmentalize a wide range of feelings into concrete examples to stay grounded. Didion starts to reflect on how she
wasn’t aware of the irrational thinking because she didn’t see the “signs, warning flags” (35) that
signified her mind’s response to tragedy but instead brushed past them as insignificant in her
trauma-infused brain. Didion not only examines and discusses her writing process in the first three
chapters, but also displays how she arrives at a judgement. As a good critical thinker, she uses a wide variety of literature to start to gain her grounding in this new territory. 27
After Didion has perused and studied various materials, she concludes that she did not
“overcome [grief],” but rather reflects on how her thinking shifted over time as she moved past
mourning into grieving. She writes, “I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or
wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome” (35). Her wish to “reverse the
outcome” is evident in her initial scrutiny of John’s death. She seemed convinced that he was not
really gone, so she refused to give away his belongings because he would come back. She asks,
“How could he come back if they took his organs? How could he come back if he had no shoes?”
(41). She asks herself these question-- that she later deems irrational--to disrupt the overwhelming
thoughts of John’s loss indicative of her mourning. Didion describes her resistance to accept the
death of her husband fully while describing the disturbing nature of living in abject denial for
months. Only after allowing herself to reflect on her grieving process does she recognize how
resistant she was to move into mourning and develop coping strategies. The behavior she
describes is reminiscent of the “manic depressive illness” examined by Melanie Klein. Didion
describes how she could not read the obituaries of John because his death would become too
publicly real (35). The resistance Didion had to reading John’s obituary exposes how she struggles
to negotiate the private nature of grief, mourning, and bereavement with the publicness of the
obituary and what it represents. Once she fully allows herself to realize what the obituary and the
funeral represent does she allow herself to become immersed in mourning.
Didion’s mourning mindset is reflected in her fragmented prose where she shows that
“grief connects the self to reactions that are natural and culturally recognizable, yet not always
understood or accepted, as well as isolates the self from the social and discursive” (Malecka 161). In the chapters where Didion “isolates” herself in research13, she is representing how the fragmented 28 processes of mourning and grief can drive an individual into a push and pull between isolation and public appearances. While mourning takes a more public form and requires Didion to develop coping strategies, her grief requires her to navigate her new, private experience in developing a relationship with John in his death. Since Didion is already a public figure, she seems to take a great deal of time to gain enough composure to take her mourning public.
The point where Didion reaches past grief and enters mourning seems to emerge on page
43 where she describes the aftermath of John’s funeral. Her daughter Quintana read a poem at his service, and when the final words had been said, Didion resolved, “I had done it. I had acknowledged that he was dead. I had done this in as a public way I could conceive” (43). Her shift in thinking, almost mechanical by description, marked her journey from mourning the tragedy of his sudden death into the state of mourning. Didion describes herself as a very private and introverted individual, and after she took time alone to investigate what could have happened to
John, she declared her acknowledgment happened once his death was publicized in front of her.
Although she did not make a public declaration, she portrays her mental movement through the future translation of her experience. Her declaration mirrors her translation into making sense of grief and what the grieving process will entail for her.
Didion’s relentless articulation of pain and suffering in her first chapters acts as a catalyst for the subsequent chapters about her decline and submersion into mourning. Scholars such as
Sidonie Smith state,
In such examples constructing memoir becomes an act of mourning not only personal loss
but collective vulnerability and communal loss. Memoirs using thanatography [stories or 29
accounts written about an individual’s death] as a public form of mourning are finding new
ways to tell stories of loss (139).
Didion did not allow herself to write about John for months after the incident. She tells her readers
that the first lines of The Year of Magical Thinking were the only words she wrote in four months (4),
and the publicness of his service shifted her mindset into a new sadness, a new sense of grief.
Regardless of what the title of the book suggests, to work through grief, does not take a finite
amount of time, or one “year of magical thinking,” but once Didion reaches a point where she “is no
longer classifiable as ‘in mourning’” (Brickey 152). As she passes the barrier from grief into
mourning, Didion engages with her process directly and in her vulnerable state translates her
“magical thinking.”
III. Comparison of The Year of Magical Thinking to Blue Nights: Universal Grieving to Inexplicable
Melancholy
Blue Nights, published in 2011, is the last published memoir that Joan Didion has produced
to date. In this memoir, she discusses how she finds herself suspended in the perpetual mourning
of Quintana after she succumbed to her long illness. Since she had only lost John eighteen months
prior, she was still making sense of her grief over his sudden death when she was faced with losing her only child. In Blue Nights, Didion candidly discusses notions about motherhood and the guilt she feels over various aspects of Quintana’s upbringing. While The Year of Magical Thinking is widely renowned and praised for a universally applicable view of grief, Blue Nights was criticized for its haunted and dark descriptions of perpetual mourning. 30
In The Year of Magical Thinking, another layer of Didion’s grief rests on the impending,
anticipated grief of her daughter Quintana. In chapter four, Didion is in Quintana’s hospital room a
year before John’s passing. As she is reflecting on the journey of Quintana’s illness and John’s eventual death, she says,
Unusual dependency (is that a way of saying “marriage”? “husband and wife”? “mother and
child”?) is not the only situation in which complicated or pathological grief can occur.
Another, I read in the literature, is one which the grieving process is interrupted by
“circumstantial factors” say by “a delay in the funeral” or by “an illness or second death in
the family. (55)
Her reference to a medical journal discussed earlier provides her with the ability in her position
after losing John to substantiate how her grief was and still was delayed because of Quintana’s
illness. Although Quintana did recover enough to make it to John’s funeral in late 2004, Didion is
cognizant that her pathological grief over John was clouded by her intense worry over Quintana’s
impending and eventually fatal illness. Didion contemplates her “dependency” on John and her
complicated relationship to Quintana as her adopted mother. In grief, she has the writing of The
Year of Magical Thinking to see how interconnected all her relationships are and how she navigated
them to find solace.
In contrast to the universality and solace in grief found within The Year of Magical Thinking,
Joan Didion in Blue Nights describes in depth what she calls the “issue of frailty”14 to understand
how to survive the continuous mourning of her daughter Quintana. In The Year of Magical Thinking,
Didion touches on her realization of aging and growing frailty, but the sudden tragedy of losing her 31
only daughter breaks her down to remains that were regarded by her family and friends as frail.
Blue Nights is a narrative rich with a lasting tone of bleakness most certainly brought on by mourning and facing her aging body and mind. Towards the beginning of Blue Nights, Didion tells her readers, “I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a
point at which I can no longer tell a true story” (109). Didion’s search for “truth” amidst tragedy was
partially consolidated within The Year of Magical Thinking, where she finds truth in research and
translation of memory. However, in Blue Nights, she has lost the momentum to do so.
Didion’s idea of finding or discovering “truth” in memoir reading and writing falls in line
with critical discourse surrounding memoir studies. Critics such as Sarah Heston relay that memoir
should be an act “to be focused on articulating a true, individual self, should be a ripe target for
critical theorists, which should in turn make these theorists ripe targets for memoir specialists”
(Heston). Didion enriches both of her memoirs with critical readings and research to exemplify her
discovery of the self. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion seems to have a more stable analytic
anchor to “[articulate] a true, individual self,” but in Blue Nights, the panic associated with another
sudden trauma leaves her static, unable to progress into a search for “truth.”15
Didion’s search for “truth” in Blue Nights takes on a connotation of guilt that was not found in The Year of Magical Thinking. In mourning the loss of Quintana, she has been referenced by many critics, as cold, or embodying a “cool detachment” (Frascella). The prolonged illness of Quintana was referenced in detail within The Year of Magical Thinking, but alternatively, Didion takes the space in Blue Nights to examine a great deal of possibility. She discusses her wish to “reverse the narrative” in The Year of Magical Thinking, but by the end realizes that she can find acceptance in 32
the unknown. In Blue Nights, she seems stuck in the unknowing— the notion of relentless suffering
is foreign to her. She comes to the realization that grieving the loss of a child is different from
anything she had known because she was “never not afraid” (54) of what could happen to
Quintana. She candidly displays the mother’s fear of the unknown when it comes to the outcome
of their children. Didion represents a continual sense of fear and how she gives into the fear once
the unthinkable outcome has happened.
Didion moves into her writing of Blue Nights four years after her daughter Quintana passes
away—John and Quintana died twenty months apart16—because the tragedy was too fresh and
painful to dive into in the year or two after. Various critics, such as Rachel Cusk from The Guardian, have commented on how The Year of Magical Thinking is a beautiful amalgamation of her grief over
John’s passing, while Blue Nights is a raw narrative that delves into a type of tragedy that is more
taboo, more untouched than the first.17As previously mentioned, Didion requires more of a
removal in Blue Nights than she did with The Year of Magical Thinking for the simple reason that it
was too painful. Didion often returns to addressing her readers directly to center herself again in
her narrative (134). She articulates through those moments having to pull herself out of the dark,
static spaces that prevent her from gaining momentum.
The prolonged suppression of Didion’s feelings are found in The Year of Magical Thinking as
she is still trying to make sense of what happened—almost as if she is trying to solve a mystery. As
she stated in her lecture “Why I Write,” Didion expresses “I write entirely to find out what I’m
thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear” (2). She
writes directly about fear in Blue Nights in relation to fear in existence and loss. She says: 33
I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already
behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to
be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her. (188)
Joan Didion associates Blue Nights with relentless melancholy and her description of obtaining
Quintana’s ashes represented in her staccato clauses in the concluding lines of her memoir. Since
she writes to know “what [she] fears,” she bears for her readers the realization of her thinking. She
is “experiencing” the perpetual mourning of losing her daughter so soon after losing her husband.
She had contemplated after John’s death in The Year of Magical Thinking what else she could lose.
By this point, she is deep in her realization of the fullness of her loss. She wants desperately to hold
onto the memories she has of her because she doesn’t want to lose that, but as she discusses at
many points, the memories become too overwhelming and harmful. Joan Didion tries to claw her
way through her static suffering and by publishing Blue Nights, she accomplishes “[a resurrection
of] her self a salute to her own aliveness”, (Chawla 381). Didion dives right into writing about the solemn subject, wears vulnerability on her shoulder, and bears her mourning for her audience.
The universality of the grieving experience in The Year of Magical Thinking is comforting to many readers, who have experienced loss, but the unfamiliar tragedy of losing Quintana in Blue
Nights makes Didion’s prose “unbearable”18 for some. Upon the release of Blue Nights, Didion was
remarked as a brave memoirist to delve into such tragic territory, but also found herself at the
hands of some critics that deemed her work “troubling” (Cusk). The “troubling” nature of Blue
Nights does not solely stem from Didion’s resistance to withhold details about Quintana’s death, 34
but also Didion’s candidness about the guilt she feels about Quintana’s upbringing (Brockes). I believe that Didion’s choice to withhold certain information stems from the internal battle she has between the public and the private— she had only published one memoir before Blue Nights and her attempt to translate mourning and grief in the same universal sense was unavailable for tragedy of this scale and proximity, making her memoir uncomfortable for some readers. She could not move past grief, into mourning, and back into enlightened grief as she did in after losing
John because she is stuck in a state of perpetual melancholy and darkness.
Didion translates grief in Blue Nights in a style of regret and longing, often expressing her regret for not appreciating fully the time she had with her daughter and husband. She conveys her longing to become solitary (33). In The Year of Magical Thinking, especially when Didion discusses the “vortex effect,” her discussion of memory, although painful, brings her back to a place of grounding and presence. In Blue Nights, however, memory is “haunting.” (Kuesck) Didion’s tone does not come across as destructive, necessarily, she rather employs a strictly solemn tone as she tries to process the tragic territory of losing her only child. Some critics have characterized her tone as “cold” as Lawrence Frascella from NPR discusses, but her efforts to withhold certain information while exposing other feelings, for me makes her memoir much more representative of the battle between public and private bereavement as Didion discusses in her previous memoir.
The balance and turmoil between the private and public aspects of Didion’s life is manifested from her journalism to her memoirs. As she navigates areas of the political, the public, and private, she starts to realize how her wide-reaching career and the attention of the public eye 35 affected her relationship to John and Quintana. In an interview with the Guardian in 201119 she said,
“‘It must have been very odd for Quintana to grow up in this world, she thinks, the only child
of two writers who, […] spent far too much time "dwelling" on things. I remember her
saying once that she didn't want to read anything we had written, because when you read
something you make a judgment on it, and she didn't want to be in the position of making
a judgment on her mother and father.’” (54-55)
In The Year of Magical Thinking and later in Blue Nights, we rely on Joan Didion to provide narrative of her daughter’s illness and recollections of important moments in Quintana’s life that Didion recorded. Here, Didion is discussing the complicated position of being a subject in memoir. In The
Year of Magical Thinking she candidly explains how she never had an explicit conversation with John about if she could write about him or Quintana (67), which possibly triggered some uncertainty in the production of both their memoirs posthumously.
Quintana’s aversion to reading her parent’s work struck me as surprising yet contained verisimilitude. In various interviews20, Didion has expressed that there is a significant layer of guilt in Blue Nights but does not specify where the guilt stems from. I can only imagine that some of the latent guilt Didion expresses in Blue Nights is connected to the writer’s guilt of writing about someone posthumously— especially someone as intimately connected as her only child. While in
The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion seems to eventually make peace with the memories of John and finds resolution in her eventual progression into grief, in Blue Nights, she shows that some tragedies inflict too much pain and cause too much frailty to move past the period of mourning. 36
IV. Didion’s Private and Public Translation of Enlightened Grief in The Year of Magical Thinking
To gain resilience and propel forward in her grief narrative, Didion’s relies on information
as “control” (44) and uses various modes of information to find some resolution and enlightenment
as she returns to grief. As much as Didion does not consider herself to be a scholar,21 she does
have an imperative to search for truth in literature. In her extensive textual search, she almost mocks the selection of grief narratives as they seem either “abstract” (45) or instructive—those that imply that by taking certain steps, a person can get over grief. Didion references and finds great knowledge in medical journals where physicians and researchers conducted studies and report results about physical and cognitive decline in grieving patients (46). Didion uses her vast research to discover how she will make it past certain moments, so she will not become someone who succumbs to the power of grief and lets it completely deteriorate her body and mind. Instead, she takes control of her mind and body and lets herself control the narrative.
Although Didion seems to be haunted in some senses by the “abstract” nature of her turn
into grief, she does start to purge a sense of resilience in her metaphorical translation of language
in grief. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin refers to “translation as a mode” (70). Benjamin
adumbrates the process of an effective translation as a process reminiscent of the writing and
critical reading processes. He discusses what he calls “translatability” to infer which texts have the
need or call to be translated and which texts do not. Benjamin asks, “Does the nature lend itself to
translation and, therefore, in view of the significance of the mode call for it?” Joan Didion finds her
calling to translate and transcribe her thoughts when she finds herself in a space of lost meaning in 37
grief. Since Didion is a lifelong writer, she has the mechanics to describe and imbue significance to thought, but in the new territory of intense grief, she is forced to employ new tactics to adequately translate her experience. In many instances, Didion juxtaposes chaotic thought with clean cut logic to make sense of her mind and translate her thoughts into enriched language.
Throughout the middle of her memoir, Didion often returns to her research, and in a logos- centered approach, reflects on her own acts and behaviors after John died to make sense of her past and current behaviors and actions. Didion often uses her research to return and reflect to the relationship she had with John, both within the scope of their marriage but also in their intertwined writing careers. Didion has expressed in her memoirs and various interviews22 how John helped her with grammar because she edits according to the sound of language, not the mechanics of grammar. She in exchange helped him with aspects of characterization in his novels23. Their love
for writing, both private and public, and their mutual investigation in language is prevalent by the
void Didion feels just after John’s death. Didion’s feelings of abandonment and attention to details
are juxtaposed with the paramedic calling her “cool customer” (15) on the night John died.
As a writer and translator of her memory, Didion chooses to rarely tell her readers that she
is or was crying. She instead brings in her readers and describes what was occurring while relying
on the emotion of her experience to permeate and evoke emotion. She does not need to employ
charged language to represent the sadness in her memory—the description of experience does
that on its own. In the second chapter of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion expresses her shock
and inability to fully grasp the tragic event of John’s sudden passing through short, staccato
clauses. She tells her readers: 38
They gave me the cash that had been in his pocket. They gave me his watch. They gave me
his cell phone. They gave me a plastic bag in which they said I would find his clothes. I
thanked them. [. . .] I wondered what an uncool customer would be allowed to do. Break
down? Require sedation? Scream? (15-16)
Didion often references what others think of her and while she does not address them in the
moment, she often uses their concerns as a basis for her later quandaries. In her last paragraph of
chapter two, Didion traverses into the question of acceptable grieving and unacceptable grieving.
She is handed John’s possessions, and with each possession, she conveys a sense of meaning that
is lost without him to possess them. Didion does not seem to completely reject the instantaneous
nomenclature of “a cool customer,” but she does carry the notion of her varying public emotions
into her discussion of how she fits into various territories, as a writer, a wife, and as a mother.
Due to her various categorizations, Didion seems to find difficulty in her mode and
processes of translating and transcribing her most intimate memories for her public audience. She translates the notion of her private relationship when she describes the nature of her writer’s connection with John and the loss of meaning once he is gone. She says, “Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voices. There was no separation between our investments or interests in any given situation” (16). Since Didion has expressed that she writes to understand how she thinks, her sudden loss of John caused her to feel unfulfilled as her writing companion and husband was no longer with her. She follows her contemplation of her reliance on John in her writing process with, “What I remember about the
apartment the night I came home alone from New York was its silence” (16). The “silence” does not 39
evoke sentimentality, but rather resembles the absence of his voice and expresses the emptiness
of her writing space now that he is deceased—the absence of language and the loss of meaning.
Didion’s reference of “silence” falls into line with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the translator as a poet. He says that the work of a poet is “spontaneous” (76), while the work of a translator is
“derivative, ultimate” (76). While Didion’s narrative does follow a fragmented process, her structure and formulation of memory in tandem with grief comes across as very intentional as she is moving into her story. With that differentiation, Didion falls into both categories of a poet and of a translator—making her work simultaneously perplexing and universal. Benjamin goes on shortly after to quote and translate French poet Stephane Mallarme’s concept of “truth” in translation and language. He says:
The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking:
thinking is writing without accessories or even whispering, the immortal word still remains
silent; the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everyone from uttering the words which
otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth. (77)
What Mallarme is suggesting about translation bridges a gap between notions of “truth” in either
thought or written “doctrine” (77). His examination of “thinking as writing” transpires in Didion’s memoir as she is trying to find truth both in her memory and in the transcription and publication of her writing. At first, she visibly struggles to connect her swirling thoughts in morning and finds herself at a standstill, unable to write more than four lines (3). Once she reaches a point of ability, she starts to unravel the coalescence of grief— what all these various thoughts, images, and practices had to do with her process. She regards “the imperfection of languages” as she willingly 40 admits how she struggled to locate “the correct track” (53) of how it was acceptable or okay to traverse her new territory of grief.
Didion proves through her revision, her “[failure] to reconstruct” (63), that grief does not follow a linear path of resolution. As much as she grounded herself in literature and medical journals to find a remnant of connection and validation, it took her perseverance to reach past withholding and produce a narrative that distinctly demonstrates a move past the static and regressive nature of mourning into an enlightened state of grief.
41
Chapter Two: Joan Didion’s "Vortex Effect": A Liminal Translation of Illuminated Grief,
Bereavement, and Dismissal of Sentimentality.
In The Year of Magical Thinking24, Joan Didion gains the composure to move past the
grieving and mourning of her husband and contemplates notions of memory in relation to time
and place to make sense of her new-found, lasting grief. She translates her emotions and feelings
of grieving into the complex nature of experiencing “the vortex effect” to efficaciously move into to
a space of acceptance in the liminality of loss. Although she does not set out with the explicit intention to dismiss notions of sentimentality, she demonstrates a unique ability to write about grief and tragedy without cheapening emotion through a targeted attempt to evoke pity.
I. Liminality in Didion’s Enlightened Grief Translation— The “Vortex Effect”
As Joan Didion progresses in composing The Year of Magical Thinking, she reaches
realizations about grief and bereavement that reveal an enlightening and haunting understanding
for herself and her readership as she vividly explores her relationship to memory and lasting
bereavement. Although her memoir is comprised of fragmented memories, she demonstrates an
onward motion in her progression of the narrative, signifying that she is not being held static by
mourning and grief. As she translates her memory into text, she articulates how she
“reconstruct[s]” (63) her narrative to move past grief into mourning and from latent grief to find
some hint of resolution.
To document the swirling black hole of her grieving memories, Didion repeatedly illustrates in The Year of Magical Thinking what she calls the “vortex effect” (107). She states in the opening
section of chapter 10, “I had first noticed what I came to know as the vortex effect in January when I
was watching the ice floes form on the East River at Beth Israel North” (107). As Didion watched the 42
“ice floes form," she dove into a “good line of thinking” (107) that caused her to launch her mind into memories of her writing the novel Play it as it Lays, which in turn caused her to think of
Quintana when she was three years old. That is when she stops to say, “There it was, the vortex”
(110). The “vortex” causes Didion to access an inventory of memories— memories that bring her a
certain amount of solace in the act of remembrance but prove to exhaust her once the vortex
calms.
Didion’s ability to write about her remembrance of minute details and chronicle their
significance in relation to many other points in her life is astounding. Her sense of remembrance
within the vortex effect elucidates her unique expertise in writing. Critics such as Mark Muggli have
commented on Didion’s ability to illuminate seemingly insignificant or minute details to
demonstrate the significance of certain images to memory. However, by highlighting certain
images, she does not suggest that the images are representative of the complexity of her grieving
process and experience. Muggli contends, “Didion has fixed on these images so not as metonymic
bits of observed history, even though nearly all of them were that once, nor even as symbols for
groups of people or types of event” (408). Didion’s sporadic images and memory serve as
touchstones, essential for her navigation in the new terrain of loss. The notion that the images
“were [representative of her experience] once” while John and Quintana were still alive illuminates
Didion’s paradoxical relationship to memory now that the living embodiment is missing. Although
her memories do not bring her solace or resolution after the passing of Quintana, after John’s death, memories provide her with the ability to map out her life for her readers in a way that feels deeply intimate— as if we are voyeurs experiencing her life alongside her. 43
Didion’s “observed history” converges into stark metaphors and pristine images that act on their own to invite readers in to make meaning. Through the vortex, she remembers their “house on Brentwood park” (131) where she held parties with John and their friends. She uses the image perhaps to distract herself from Quintana’s tumultuous illness. The “vortex effect” for Didion does not solely act as a method of dissonance because it also allows her to filter through her consciousness and pick out various connecting points of her history to understand herself and her relationship to John and Quintana before he passed, and she became ill. In multiple sections before
Didion has embarked in her grieving process and is floundering in the tumultuous nature of mourning, she attempts to grasp “a good line of thinking” (107) to help keep her grounded in her present moment. When the vortex effect first emerges in chapter ten, Didion seems to be suggesting that the memories she picks out of the vortex happen after she is out of that head space because trying to filter through the memories in the swirling nature of the vortex would prove to be impossible.
While the vortex allows her to filter through memory and eventually craft a narrative rich with “metonymic” images, The Year of Magical Thinking portrays how Didion falls subject to the power of the vortex and into places that eventually require reassessment in her memoir. Didion methodically discusses her avoidance of certain places in Los Angeles when she says, “I saw immediately in Los Angeles that its potential for triggering this vortex effect could be controlled only by avoiding any venue I associate with either Quintana or John. This would require ingenuity
(113).” She goes on to explain driving down certain roads would cause her to remember the significant places she and John frequented— the coffee shop where they would work on deadlines, the restaurant where they could walk in and be seated at any time (113). The liminal nature of 44
avoidance starts to appear in Didion’s thinking— she wants to stay grounded in the present but by
the triggering of certain images, she would be sure to be caught in the downward spiral. She
yearns to feel connected to John and Quintana (who at this point in the narrative is very ill) but
feels an imperative to focus on her own connection in being, rather than getting caught in the
unavoidable sadness of remembrance. Caught between her adherence to her present space and
the pull of memory, Didion creates a liminal space of grief that she attempts to translate though
various narrative strategies.
The vortex effect allows Didion to craft a narrative that at times can be hard to follow but is indicative of her writing and critical thinking processes. Although her readers may not directly relate to the reflection and experience Didion describes in the grieving process and vortex effect, they can draw meaning from her shared experience and apply certain language to aid in personalized understanding. Joan Didion in turn engages in a dialectic with her readers where she becomes a translator and a storyteller.
In her various modes of writing from journalism, to editorial work, to memoir, Joan Didion
has established herself throughout the last fifty years as an accomplished storyteller and a
celebrated voice in literary studies. While she keeps certain aspects of her life private, she lets in her readers enough to make them feel part of her experiences. In Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The
Storyteller,” he describes a storyteller and writer, Nikolai Leskov, and says, “[t]o present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him” (83). Didion writes within the genre of the “grief memoir,” which is inherently public, but does so in a way that makes her readers feel close and distanced from her. By 45
representing the grieving experience and memory through the “vortex effect,” she invites her readers in to a palatable25 story, but the splintered nature of her narrative creates a sense of distance from her readers and makes it apparent that she writes The Year of Magical Thinking “if
only for [herself].” (8)
Although the vortex allows her to produce an amalgamation of memory, she also describes
her process as a method of revision. On page 134, Didion asks, “Did that corrective line of thinking
stop the vortex? Not hardly.” Preceding that question, Didion recounts the moment she saw the
“razed house” (134) and how that sight made her want possession of John’s books. Although the
two thoughts are not plainly connected, she uses the term “corrective” to derive the concept of memory as revision to distract the self from the inexplicable pangs of heart-wrenching feelings that come in waves with lasting grief. As a storyteller, she is removing herself enough from the initial writing and revision because the loss is too fresh, but she is also demonstrating how she
pushed through to find courage in producing The Year of Magical Thinking, which puts her into the
public eye. Through her correction and revision, she is demonstrating the paradox of the
storyteller’s quest to tell a story that will in turn cause them to become vulnerable.
Joan Didion does not let the vulnerability that swirls in the vortex effect stall her eventual
writing. By Chapter 12, Didion seems to resolve herself in the liminality of the vortex effect by her
metacognitive evaluation of self in relation to her writing. She candidly speaks about her thinking
process as she is thinking about her writing journey. She returns to the image of the East River on
page 141 and watches the “ice floes form” just as she did when first discussing the vortex at the
beginning of chapter 10. She is reading a copy of Nothing Lost, the last novel written by John, 46
published posthumously and becomes fixated on what she perceives to be a grammatical error.
She obsesses over the addition or removal of a preposition in one sentence, convinced that she altered something in her editing (141). She says, “Any choice I made could carry the potential for abandonment, even betrayal. That was one reason I was crying in Quintana’s hospital room […]
The error, if it was an error, had been there from the beginning. I left it as it was” (141). Didion’s obsession over analyzing the “vortex effect” demonstrates how memory can bring solace, guilt, and feelings of “abandonment, even betrayal.” Through her efforts to reconcile the original words
of her late husband with new language and new meaning, she illuminates the writer’s guilt— the guilt she almost felt for changing his words, his history, and the guilt some memoirists have expressed for writing about someone after they died. Didion presents her journey through grief in the only translation she finds truthful— and for her truth comes from reflection, research, and the melding of both into a liminal and temporal amalgamation of memory and feeling.
Didion often describes the vortex in the context of visiting Quintana. She seems to use the suction of remembrance to disassociate from fully realizing the gravity of Quintana’s illness. Didion in turn, returns to her research in chapter 12 as she contemplates further what the vortex means to her in the translation of her grief. She references Sigmund Freud who discusses the painful
connection of memory to physical objects (people) and states, ‘“It is remarkable that this painful
unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us”’ (133). Didion connects his discussion of the “work”
(133) that exists in grief to be reminiscent of the vortex effect. Although Freud is representing the
“libido [as] bound to the object” (133), Didion is representing the “work” of grief to be the
detachment of the libido, and the vortex effect acts as a gateway for the self to be detached from
the weight of time and memory, perhaps to understand the experience of grieving. As Didion 47
works through her grief, she ties her memories to inanimate objects, and because of her
journalistic mindset, she accentuates minute details and illustrates lush images. The images don’t
necessarily become metonyms, but the “work” of processing the varying emotions that come with
remembrance can be overwhelming or a “painful unpleasure.” Her remembrance is essential in the
process of writing her memoir; however, doing so proves painful especially in her externalized
mourning and internalized grief. She asks (about the vortex effect): “Would I need to relive every
mistake?” (132). Didion now presents memory with a sense of candid pain— she tells her readers
that although a keen sense of remembrance can prove to be fruitful to the relationship she has with her deceased husband and her ill daughter, she also shows that the vortex takes her into places that pull her from her place in the present moment into a liminal whirlwind of emotion— most prominently guilt, sadness, and regret.
Even though The Year of Magical Thinking is predominantly dedicated to her relationship to
John, Didion also infiltrates the narrative with extended anecdotes that extenuate and explain her relationship to Quintana following John’s death. She often writes the sections in a bleak tone that evokes the loss of meaning both in her grief of John’s physical absence and the uncertainty of
Quintana’s future. Through her placement of the simultaneous relationships, she illuminates the depth of her sadness and the paradox of her grief. In chapter five, Didion recounts a day she continues to come back to, December 30, 2003. She was at the hospital with John that day and the
ICU doctors were unsure if Quintana would make it. Didion reflects,
I recognized it as a coded way of saying that she was going to die, but I persisted: The way
this is going is up. It’s going up because it has to go up. 48
I believe in Cat.
I believe in God.
“I love you more than one more day”, Quintana said three months later standing in the
black dress at St. John the Divine. “As you used to say to me.” (69)
The amalgamation of internal dialogue, remembrance of John’s writing, and a vivid memory of
Quintana masterfully landscapes the complexity of the grieving experience. Didion’s initial pleading of “the way this is going is up” represents her persistence to a sense of inner faith that her
daughter would pull through. Being a critical thinker and writer, Didion looked past the words of the doctors and saw their “coded” way of saying she would likely die. Her pleading words of reconciliation repeat at other points in her memoir, but in this section, she uses this as a purposeful
memory to directly connect this moment to a litany of others that are bubbling under the surface.
Didion’s use of italics often represents her internal dialogue— moments that come back to her upon reflection. The next two lines, “I believe in Cat. I believe in God” are a direct reference to
John Dunne’s novel The Dutch Shea, Jr. where the protagonist commits suicide after learning that his daughter Cat was killed by a bomb while his wife was using the restroom (51). John’s writing of the novel sparked a debate between himself and Didion over whether the character’s suicide was due to “faith” or “grief” (51). Joan Didion follows up by asking, “Was it about faith or was it about grief? Were faith and grief the same thing?” Didion’s intentional recounting of a line from John’s book represents her effort to disassociate from the impending tragedy of losing Quintana. The 49
interconnectedness of memories is accessed by the vortex effect and allows her to discover
connections that help her better understand the tangled web of grieving remembrance.
The vortex effect guides her into a memory of a conversation John had with her, which she
later connected to Quintana’s words, “I love you more than one day.” The passage leaves readers
wondering whether Quintana is speaking to Didion at John’s funeral, or if she is speaking to her father in a spiritual sense— sharing words “as [he] used to say to [her]”. But later, in chapter 14,
Didion recollects that John used to repeat “I love you more than day” (177) when he visited
Quintana in her hospital room. She imbues the memory of John’s words with Quintana at his funeral and further represents how memory can be clouded and confusing at first but becomes clearer when she starts to have more resolution in the later parts of her memoir. Her infusion of her memory with the words and memory of her daughter represents the liminal connection she has in the present to Quintana, as she is enduring a tumultuous illness, and is anxious and unsure about her future. At the same time, Didion is developing a liminal connection and deep relationship with
John in his death.
Didion draws from memory and the power of the vortex effect to bring forward latent,
suppressed memories, which she describes as painful, but which also provide her with the ability to
craft her story in the way she needs. She craves understanding, validation, and grounding in her
grieving process. After consistently reading medical journals and various other modes of literature
to gain “control” (44) and compose herself enough to write about John’s death in detail, she reaches a point of recognition, of awareness to spiritual ideologies and “symbols” (152) that guide her into a pathway of acceptance in bereavement. In Didion’s intimate relationship with John and 50
his writing and her own writing, she developed a keen awareness of the connections between his
work, the conversations they had, and the eventual tragic outcome of his death. While she was in
the initial stages of grief and mourning, Didion lived in a space of aberrant denial where she did not
fully believe John had died. When she passes into the threshold into enlightened grief, she enters a
space of transcendent bereavement, where she must negotiate her presence and her relationship to John, posthumously. She represents her passing from denial to a complicated space of reflective curiosity and guilt on page 152 when she asks, “If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of the day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?” In this passage, Didion taps into the complicated nature of transcending and emerging into the grieving process. Just because she has reached a point past mourning, doesn’t mean that she doesn’t consume herself with feelings of regret and guilt along the way.
Here, she provides a succession of questions, and with each one, she enlightens a different aspect of the relationship we have to the dead. Didion presents the concept of “allowing them to die” as a direct reflection of the latent guilt she feels for not predicting John’s impending illness. She is living in a liminal state of “magical thinking” while still holding onto and circling around notions of the past that she hopes will guide her towards a sense of acceptance.
As Didion pushes past the power of the vortex effect, she moves into a space of
enlightened curiosity through a contemplation of hidden messages in memory. Didion reflects
back to interconnected memory layers in the later chapters of The Year of Magical Thinking but
doesn’t name her reflection “the vortex effect.” She instead chronicles various threads of liminal
reflection, analysis, and compartmentalization that accumulate into realization. Didion states on 51
page 152, “Survivors often look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the
tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car. They live by symbols.” Didion does
not attribute this notion to any of her research but instead uses this idea as a segue into her search
for meaning amidst “omens” or “messages” (152) that she came across in her reflective
examination of John’s belongings. In the early chapters, Didion seems to examine John’s
belongings with the hope that they would uncover an explanation or truth, but in the later
chapters, his belongings serve as a liminal gateway into understanding herself and gaining
meaning through their connection to her memory. She plays with this notion on page 152 when
she came across John’s dictionary. She writes:
I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary […] When I realized what I had done I was
stricken: that was the last word he looked up, what had he been thinking? By turning the
pages had I lost the message? Or had the message been lost before I touched the
dictionary? Had I refused to hear the message?
Her contemplation and concern with the loss of meaning over the interaction with symbols
represents her fascination with John’s intellect and writing and her attempt to restore order to the changing nature of life without him. The underlying “message” in the dictionary or what the page
in the dictionary is indicative of her dependence on language to help uncover subliminal and
nuanced understanding of the complexity of life— aiding her in successfully completing her “year
of magical thinking.”
In Didion’s reflection and translation of her grieving process, she connects her memory of the day in the hospital to observing Quintana sharing words with her father at his funeral— proving 52
how memory has no bounds and no clear reason in connecting moments. Although the vortex
effect brings forth a slew of jumbled memories that are often painful, she uses that liminal space to hold onto the connections— the interconnected nature of her relationships, attempting to find grounding in grief. Didion’s relationship to Quintana is represented as complicated, but her
adherence to those memories shows how intimately her feelings of John and Quintana are connected in her writer’s consciousness.26
II. Translating Sentimentality Amidst Grief and Mourning
In Didion’s early writing career, she never anticipated that she would write memoirs like The
Year of Magical Thinking or Blue Nights27. She expressed in an intimate interview with reporter
Emma Brockes at The Guardian in 2011, “When I started writing, I thought it was going to be about
attitudes to raising children. Then it became clear to me that, willy-nilly, it was going to be
personal. I can't imagine what I thought it was going to be, if it wasn't personal.” Didion candidly discusses her husband and her daughter, memories of her relationships to them in the living, and
the mourning and grieving of their deaths. In comparing Didion’s earlier journalism to her more
contemporary memoir, readers can see the personal is most always prevalent— even in her
journalism and her ability to become exposed to her readers in memoir through her fragmented
prose lets us into her mind.
Joan Didion’s earlier work in journalism, although she infiltrated hints of the personal, was
required to have a stance of objectivity.28 In the personal sector of memoir, Didion seems to
generate enough removal from her work to avoid being sentimental, even when writing about her
grief. Sentimentality is a notion of emotion— often categorized as a negative quality in works of 53
creative non-fiction. To write about sentiment is to write about the complexity of emotion
(Howard). Since emotion is an essential and natural part of human consciousness, the need to write about the sentimental is underscored by the negative connotations the term has received.
While Joan Didion does not outwardly state in publications or interviews that her writing dismisses notions of sentimentality, she does highlight her ability to talk about emotion candidly without seeming to evoke pity, even when writing about grief. When she questions her categorization of herself as a “cool customer” (188), she is demonstrating that grief and mourning do not evoke one response from the afflicted individual— emotion can be manifested and expressed through a myriad of outlets.
Contemporary memoirists, in particular, female memoirists struggle to write about the complexities of life such as motherhood, marriage, or death without being called overly-emotional, or intentionally seeking sentimental emotion from their audience. Scholar Rebecca Van Laer discusses the complexity of sentimentality among groups of memoirists and contends:
This may seem to be a bit of a contradiction: memoir has negative associations with
sentimentality, yet also demands of its authors the demonstration of expertise. And
perhaps this very contradiction is part of what makes the term seem weighty, if not
repugnant.
While in the earlier chapters of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion is trying to compose herself
emotionally enough to create an adequate grieving narrative for herself, in the later chapters, she
is composing language that encapsulates the complexity of the grieving process to gain agency
over her writing process and compose her emotions into a productive space. Critics such as Julia 54
Watson and Sidonie Smith have commented on Didion’s unique style in crafting a grief narrative, particularly in their essay, “In the Wake of the Memoir Boom.” They describe the boost in memoir’s progression of acceptable content in North America with its “diverse methods of storytelling”
(128). They also describe the various forms of memoir as sharing a mutual space like a “modern day bildungsroman” (129) where writers collectively share experiences to normalize certain territories such as grief and tragedy.
Although Joan Didion’s memoir creates a “mutual space,” she also creates distance from her readers as she reveals deeply private information about her life and candidly discusses her relationships with her husband and daughter. She is caught in the paradox of private grief and public writing, and she in turn chooses to chronicle her development from new loss to accepted bereavement. The author of a grief memoir partakes in a unique sense of vulnerability that can offer consolidation for their readership, but which also causes great pain for the writer. Memoirs written about mourning on the other hand, usually serve a group of people to console a group of people who were afflicted by a collective tragedy, such as 9/11. The public mourning that comes from such narratives eventually turns into the internalized and lasting feelings of grief.
Didion does not attempt to normalize her grief, nor does she write “a contemporary book of consolidation” (Smith 132). Didion moves her readers from consolation where she finds the strength to compose herself and move forward in writing, to consolidation where she can filter through memory and consolidate her feelings in an orderly fashion. Although The Year of Magical
Thinking can be perceived as anything less than orderly because Didion fills her memoir full of fragmented memories that come together to illustrate her “year of magical thinking,” she does so 55
with intention that creates order. Watson and Smith instead consider that, “Refusing the comfort that writing such a story is supposed to bring—the healing of “scriptotherapy”—Didion insists on
the fragmentary process of writing grief and articulates a vulnerability rendered in, but not contained or resolved by, life writing” (Smith 139). Smith and Watson discuss how Joan Didion does
not rely on traditional methods while writing The Year of Magical Thinking, methods that discuss the
grieving process as a step by step guide to recovery. She instead translates her grief in the way she
needs— she writes a memoir for herself. Didion candidly tells her readers early on why she forms her narrative in the fashion she does. On page seven she states, “the way I write is who I am, or
have become”. Didion does not set out to write this memoir as a how-to for other grieving individuals, but rather tells her story to enrich the landscape of what the grief narrative can become for her process to enlightenment.
To write about grief and not intentionally dig into the heartstrings of the reader to evoke
sympathy or pity is a tricky process. A common critique of women’s memoir writing is that the
female writer is sentimental. Writer and critic Leslie Jamison after receiving the same criticism
states, “The fear of being too sentimental — writing or even liking sentimental work — shadowed
the next decade of my life. […] What was the difference between a sentimental story and a
courageously emotive one?” (NY Times) Jamison poses a pertinent question: how does a writer,
especially when writing about grief avoid the sentimental?
Whether Didion set out with the intention or not, it seems that she avoids sentimentality by directly landscaping her concern for “self-pity” (3) and her struggle to move past the idea of blame, resentment, and pity to find an ounce of resolution in her process. Joan Didion’s writing is 56
remarkable partly because she does not prescribe meaning, nor does she leave her readers in the dark. Instead, she provides stark, often bleak imagery such as “the eternal dark” (156) that draws
readers into the idea of sentimentality on their own— to navigate their feelings of tragedy, loss,
and grief. In those attempts, she avoids the sentimental and “the cheapening of feeling, the pulling
of heartstrings” (Jamison). Didion does not need to employ tactics of evoking emotion because her
articulation of her grieving thought process does that on its own. She wants us to feel the weight of
her words and be engulfed by the nature of her experience, not as a “cheapening” but rather as an
exploration into the complex psyche of the grieving mind. Didion often references the concept of
“self-pity” from the first page onward perhaps to show her readers that she is not writing her
memoir to demonstrate self-pity or evoke pity from her readers. She instead is composing a
landscape of her grieving process to compose herself in her private and public bereavement and
understand how she processed grief particularly in the first year.
III. Translating “Magical Thinking” and Finding Resolution in Grief
The Year of Magical Thinking reminds me that in order to see the “shimmer”29 of memory, of
seemingly ordinary objects, I must allow myself to step into remembrance, just as Joan Didion
accomplishes throughout her memoir. Didion’s memories seem to take many drastic
directions, but she also manages to pull her readers back and forth to map out her truth. One
of Didion’s most admirable qualities in my opinion is her adherence to information as “control”
(44). Although she does not attribute her fascination with knowledge and information to her
time in the university setting, she instead reflects her preoccupation with detailed memory in
her translation of grief and mourning. 57
As Didion constructs herself as a collector of memory and detail, she brings forth the
notion of “dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order” (60) discussed by Walter
Benjamin in his essay “Unpacking my Library.” Didion attempts to restore a sense of tranquility into the disorderly paradigm of her grief by developing a confessional tone perhaps to process or start to understand her feelings. The dialectic that Joan Didion engages in is not only indicative of her juxtaposition of “disorder and order” (60), but also comes from her insistence on cultivating a space of meaningful illumination among the indelible pangs of grief that extend past her “year of
magical thinking.” At first glance at the title, a reader may be enchanted by the idea of “magical
thinking” as the connotation of “magical” is often enchanting or mystifying. At further
examination, the pairing of “magical thinking” is a direct reference to a psychological belief from a
French psychology journal published in 193430 that examines the thought process of children as
possessing enchanting qualities, as children often believe that their thoughts or wishes will change the course of an outcome (OED). The same journal also equated this concept to adults who possess mental illness. Returning to the earlier section of Didion’s memoir, she asks if her thoughts could “reverse the narrative” (35). She moves past that line of thinking as she realizes her inability
to fully accept John’s death was due to her condition of mourning. Later, she steps into a space of
enlightenment and starts to produce a space of illuminated meaning in her grief.
Didion opens chapter 17 with a discussion of what she considers to be meaningful in grief and juxtaposes that contemplation with what grief means to her as she approaches the end of her
“year of magical thinking.” She says, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” (188) She turns from her first-person narration in the previous chapter to a universal “us” with
hints of the personal to represent the universality of the grieving process. She describes grief as a 58
“place” that is impossible to anticipate what our experience or process may consist of. She discusses the familiarity we have with grief— as we feel the impending certainty of experiencing it
but cannot fully grasp what it will mean to us until it happens. She returns to the “cool customer”
(188) categorization in a way to show that we may imagine that we will act, behave, or react in certain ways, but the emotion both private and public will be different for each individual.
Subsequently, Didion again references the strain of “overcoming” (188) grief, as discussed by her reading of Melanie Klein’s theories in Didion’s earlier chapters (44). Didion takes her information, pondering, and reflection and creates an amalgamation of discovery. She writes:
Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and herein lies the heart of difference between grief as
we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very
opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront
the experience of meaninglessness itself (189).
To create a statement, a memoir, so rich with meaning in a state of meaninglessness is remarkable. Her ability to create meaning in a space “a void, the very opposite of meaning” demonstrates her unique skillset and willingness to put herself into such a public space about a deeply private subject. She is confronting the difference between her previous perception of grief and how she views it after reflection in the collective “we” once again to reveal the universal lamentation we feel our story is shared. She has grieved, she has mourned and while grieving does not go away, she is living in a space of bereavement and accepts the fact that she has lost, and she is alone to create meaning in the “experience of meaninglessness.” 59
Although Joan Didion’s experience and writing is designed to aid her own process and is
created for her own purposes, the act of sharing her experience with her readership makes her
memoir a collective consolidation of grief and memory for her wide-reaching readership. Didion, as a public figure, articulates the inward tension that arises in her pull between her private and
public persona and what that means for her writing about personal experience. In Walter
Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” he references the solitary nature of the story-teller and the
effect that has on the receiver. He states,
The duality of inwardness and outside world can here be overcome for the subject ‘only’
when he sees . . . the unity of his entire life. . . out of the past life-stream which is
compressed in memory. . . The insight which grasps this unity. . . becomes the divinatory-
intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life (99)
Joan Didion reconciles the “unity of [her] entire life” as she is able to adumbrate and combine emotion, memory, and experience into a blend palatable enough to be desired by an expansive readership. Didion is forth coming in the beginning of The Year of Magical Thinking that she could not write more than those three lines after John had died for five months. She pulls from and details her “insight” that she has received through research, reflection, and grieving, the
“inexpressible meaning of life” that has been achieved through her process. When she gets past the tumultuous ache of mourning and moves into grieving, she gains the ability to translate her meaninglessness into a collection of language enriched with meaning and ensures the potential to help herself and many others in their grieving. 60
Didion concludes her memoir with the push and pull of finding resolution amidst a fear that resolution will dissipate remembrance. She opens with a passage from her book Democracy published in the 1980’s where she is writing about being the “grandchild of a geologist” (220) and how she learned about distinct formations of rock. She connects her previous knowledge to a
Hawaiian ridge she spent time studying in Honolulu. Her critical attention to geology and
fascination with natural disasters is later connected to the rich expression of degradation in
relation to her memories of John. She expresses,
I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account. Nor did I want to finish the
year. The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking place. I look for resolution and find
more [. . .] My images of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less
raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself,
John alive, will become more remote, even “mudgy”, softened, transmuted into whatever
best serves my life without him. In fact this is already beginning to happen (225).
As Didion reaches the conclusion of her “year of magical thinking” she finds herself in a space of
resolution and fear. She is struggling with the idea of forgetting John as he was when he was
alive— that her memory of him will become “mudgy,” which she discusses was originally
Quintana’s phrase. Didion often referenced the “mudgy” nature of memory when speaking about
Quintana’s illness and hope and despair her journey caused. Here, she is vulnerable in a state of
latent panic of further loss, afraid that by concluding her year, and thus concluding her story, that
she is shutting the door of her stark memories— the memories she repeatedly held on to and
reflected upon in order to compose her memoir. She states that she does find “resolution” amidst 61
the subdued chaos that she still feels in grieving, but she is still struggling to let go in some way. As
a writer, and due to her deep connection to John as a fellow writer, she is struggling to cease
writing in the fear that once the words halt, she will feel true bereavement.
In the concluding paragraphs, Didion seems to syncretize acceptance with the
acknowledgment of change. She is using the collective “we” once again but keeping her writing
personal to her experience. She writes:
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them
with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time where we must
relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on
the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water.
Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water. (226)
Didion’s concluding words spark and validate the complexity that exists in grief and bereavement.
She knows that she must let John go— let the memories subside slightly in their riches. In her initial grieving, she obsessively tries to find injustice in his death, or to find an abnormality in the process.
Once she reaches past mourning, and into lasting grief, she acknowledges that her life has changed forever, and that there is no going back to before, bringing forth light and acceptance in her bereavement. She has let him “go in the water” but validates the never-ending void of loss that occurs when losing someone.
62
Epilogue: Translating My Life Alongside Joan Didion
I have felt nothing but appreciation for my mother recording my most intimate history. I am a reader, a researcher, and a thinker. My translation of memory has been aided greatly by reading memoir written about me because my mother was motivated to chronicle her memory through memoir. Her chapbook Not a Leg to Stand On provides illuminating snapshots of her history and relationships with her family, especially her brother Jeff who passed away on March 9,
2005. Every time I read her work, I am reminded of a new memory—a new rendition of my life that
I thought was lost but is now regained through a love for language.
The Year of Magical Thinking was published in 2005, just months after Jeff’s passing, and my
mother bought a hardback copy off the bestseller shelf at Barnes and Noble. She opened a
portal—an essential pathway to be able to understand and guide herself through grief. She has
many times expressed that Didion’s memoir helped her understand that certain behaviors and
feelings were normal. To feel the pain associated with “pathological grief” (27) is a reaction to the
void of bereavement—the understanding of true loss.
I remember reading The Year of Magical Thinking just after turning ten. I picked up the
yellow and blue hardcover memoir off the shelf in the living room and started to devour Didion’s
language. Although I was too young to recognize the nuanced concepts of grief as applying
directly to my life, I still feel twinges of recognition and warmth when I read her work today.
Feelings of grief are universal, yet the bravery it takes to articulate the indelible imprints of grief is
astounding.
63
February 27th, 2005
I am nine, going on ten in ten days, and I have a mission in mind—I want to get Uncle Jeff a present
for his birthday in two days. I know he will love whatever I get him, but I want it to be perfect.
My mom and I drive all over— Hallmark is full of tacky Valentine’s day clearance, and Ross doesn’t
have anything that catches my eye. So we go next door to Barnes and Noble where I would usually
curl up in the preteen section, sneaking passages of the new “Maximum Ride” book. Today, my mom
wants to get Jeff a hard-back copy of T.C Boyle’s new book because they have signed copies. Jeff
loved reading and watching movies—that was most of all he could do after his surgeries, so he
always had the best recommendations. Napoleon Dynamite is still a cinematic staple in my household.
I wander blissfully, but not without aim. I glance at the gift tables and past all of the notebooks and
funky pens. Then I see Hunny Bunny. He sits, lop-eared, with his bright pink bow tie, a pink heart
stitched on his chest, and I know that is the gift I should get him.
He had received a woman’s heart in his transplant.
The excitement of my gift presentation is all I can think about on the way down to Sharp Hospital.
The I-5 is long—why does the drive from Encinitas to San Diego feel like the longest eternity?
Is Uncle Jeff in pain without his legs?
Hospitals make me nervous. 64
I had been at the hospital eight months prior to visit Papa (my dad’s dad) because he was really
sick.
Uncle Jeff loved his present, and that was all that mattered in that moment. He talked to me and
was interested to hear about what I had to say and asked how school was going. Even as a nine-
year-old, I could tell that he was an adult that thought I was interesting. He asked me questions with
the genuine hope of sparking a conversation.
This was the last time he was lucid enough to have a conversation with me. The pain of living was getting to be too great.
The nurses and my family gushed over and over how perfect the gift was. Hunny Bunny with his pink heart was the star of Uncle Jeff’s room that day. I hadn’t known his name would be “Hunny
Bunny” until Uncle Jeff named him— the same affectionate name he had for my aunt.
It really was perfect.
When I read memoir written about my childhood, I wonder if I truly remember what happened or if the images construed aid me in understanding and remembrance?
Was I thinking “as a child would”?
Did the smile in the ashes “reverse the narrative”?
65
I remember. . .
The taste of the tangerine (or were they grapefruit?) candies my mom kept in her purse while we
were at the hospital. I sucked on them to cease my continuing nervousness, sucked and sucked and sucked on them until my tongue went raw.
March 7th, 2005
My mom took me to Dairy Queen before we made the drive down the I-5 to Sharp Hospital. I should have known that my mom’s immediate willingness to get me ice cream and give me candy meant there was something terribly wrong. She let me have ice cream with sprinkles and chocolate sauce on the day she told me Papa passed away. But I was nine, going on ten in a month, so I accepted the sweet treat without much thought. The sickeningly sweet soft serve ice cream with
Reese’s peanut butter cup mashed into the whimsically colored cup clouded my vision of impending loss.
I didn’t know what I was going to lose. I knew that Uncle Jeff was really sick, but I was determined to make it down to Sharp to see him. I was nervous and excited.
My mom and I would come over to his house on the next weekend, if it was warm, and use his neighborhood pool. He was always so excited for me to go swim.
I never fully comprehended that he could no longer swim, kayak, kneeboard, or bike. 66
He was tickled that I went to the pool in none other than my bathing suit and cowgirl boots. That
outfit was iconic and representative of nurturing I received in my childhood to be the person I wanted to be.
My mom has told me at many points how much Uncle Jeff enjoyed talking to me—how much he appreciated and understood my goofy, free-spirited, personality. I think about that now and smile.
He made a smiley face with the smooth, loose skin on his left stump where his upper thigh once was. I can still see his full smile, complementing his creation, as he sat across the room from me on his couch.
Tangerine hugs, turned to tangerine kisses on the cheek, about to close their eyes forever.
March 9, 2005
“Hey, Mikayla. Happy birthday! Sorry your uncle died”, my fourth-grade classmates offered.
“Thank you”, I probably remarked. What else could I say? It was a big deal birthday. I was ten—
finally double digits which meant I was pretty much an adult in kid years.
Uncle Jeff promised he wouldn’t die on my birthday, and he didn’t.
I was told that he died the night before. I sat on my bed, opposite my mom, playing the card game
Rat-a-Tat Cat, and when we finished playing a round, she told me that there was something she needed to tell me. Uncle Jeff had just passed away. I still reflect on how casually I accepted it; there wasn’t an expression of aberrant denial like there was with Papa six months prior. I said “okay”. 67
It was my birthday, so of course I was excited that my mom baked and brought cupcakes for my entire class, and she gave me the board game of “Life.”
I couldn’t see her tear-stained sunglasses as she carried the cupcakes into Mrs. O’Neill’s classroom or the puffiness of her eyes as she walked into Target to get me the most ironic and applicable board game. It wasn’t that I was immune to the sadness of that time because I was young. I just didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
I floated through my first day of being ten, eating cupcakes, taking uncomfortable condolences from my classmates, and later went to dinner at El Torito with my mom, dad, Aunt Laura and my cousin Anna. Anna made me a card, decorated with colorful drawings of balloons, and Aunt Laura gave me a present.
We sat together, in a purposeful celebration imbued by the cloud of mourning.
When we got back to the house, we all sat in the living room, and I opened the rest of my presents.
I got every material item I could have wanted, but of course, something felt missing.
Just as I thought my presents were all opened, Aunt Laura took out a bag and said, “this is from
Aunt Patty…and Jeff.”
When I reached into the celebratory bag and my hand grabbed onto the plush, soft fabric, I knew that I would keep him forever. Hunny Bunny slept with me every night for years, and when I would be scared of the shadows in my room, I would press his pink, sewn heart to my chest and I felt like everything would be a little more okay. 68
May 13th, 2005
My mom sat on the beach at La Jolla Shores as I played in the sand. She and I watched as Uncle
Jeff’s loved ones paddled out into the ocean and let go of him in the water.
I could not see back then that my mom was sitting on the very beach, staring at the very piece of ocean that she once swam with her brother. He taught her how to dive under the big waves and they would get so sunburned that they would peel.
I made sandcastles and let the grains of sand fall between my fingers and get stuck under my nails as I dug a deeper trench. It felt like hours turned to minutes before we packed up our stuff and headed back home to shower off and rest up for the party at Aunt Patty’s later.
After we showered off, we went over to Aunt Patty’s house for a get-together. I realize now it was more of a wake.
I walked into Aunt Patty’s computer room, and on the table was a copy of the obituary. It read that
Uncle Jeff passed away on March 9th, 2005. I was confused.
“Aunt Patty. The date is wrong. It was March 8th.” I was adamant that there was a misprint.
My mom looked into my eyes and told me that she didn’t want to tell me on the day of my
birthday, but yes, he did pass away on March 9th.
She didn’t want to tell me because he promised he wouldn’t die on my birthday. I accepted it almost as I had accepted the news on the night of March 8th. 69
Mourning and grief were unfamiliar to me.
I wanted to see his ashes in the wooden box in the living room. I stared into the five-pound box that
encompassed Uncle Jeff and I smiled.
My mom asked me later, “what made you smile?”
I told her.
“I asked Aunt Patty if I could see them. And then as I was looking at the white ashes and thinking
about how that was Jeff, I saw it. Didn’t you? I saw a little smile appear in the ashes. And then it disappeared. All I did was smile back.” (Keehn)
Although when I was ten years old I did not understand the meaning of Joan Didion’s language, the power I felt in the pages made me at least subliminally understand that it was all okay. The way I
“accepted” the news of Uncle Jeff’s passing, the condolences of my classmates, the smile in the ashes.
I was and still am living in a liminal state of understanding and resolving my relationship to those who I love that have passed away. As I read my mother’s chapbook and see how she paints memory and thought and imbues the two with distinct meaning, I feel more connected to my life, and to my remembrance. Meaning is rendered lost during periods of intense grief and mourning, but the power of language among alike individuals can bring solace to the idea that it is all acceptable. There is no handbook to tell you how to “get over” grief. There is only memory and 70
experience and how we cognitively work around and negotiate the relationship between the two. I don’t want to change the path or “reverse the narrative.” I just want to keep living and experiencing
for those who want me to experience all I can from this life.
Uncle Jeff once told me that if there was anything in my life that I wanted to do, I should do it.
This is me doing just that.
71
Works Cited
Als, Hilton. The Paris Review,20Feb.2020, www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5601/joan-didion- the-art-of-nonfiction-no-1-joan-didion. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. “The Task of The Translator”, “The Storyteller”, “Unpacking my Library.” Schocken Books. 2007. Pp 1-99. Bladek, Martha. “A Place None Of Us Know Until We Reach It: Mapping Grief And Memory in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking." Brickey, Alyson. “Advancing Necessarily Askew”: The Technology of Mourning in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 48.2 (2015): 149-61. Web. Brockes, Emma. “Joan Didion: Life after Death.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 Oct. 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/21/joan-didion-blue-nights. Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (US). “Understanding the Impact of Trauma.” Trauma- Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services., U.S. National Library of Medicine, 1 Jan. 1970, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/. Chawla, Devika. The Writerly Reader in Memoir: Intersubjectivity and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.” The Review of Communication. Vol. 8, No. 4, October 2008, pp. 377-394 Couser, Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford University Press. 2011. Cusk, Rachel. “Blue Nights by Joan Didion – Review.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 11 Nov. 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/11/blue-nights-joan-didion- review.
Diamond, Sam. “American Truth and Hysteria: The Evolution of Joan Didion.” 3, 2 May 2018, https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/joan-didion-truth-and-hysteria-in-america/. Daum, Meghan. “The Elitist Allure of Joan Didion.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 11 Aug. 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-elitist-allure-of-joan- didion/399320 Didion, Joan. Blue Nights. Fourth Estate, 2012.
Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “On Keeping a Notebook.” Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 1968.
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Fournier, Lauren. http://www.laurenfournier.net/Autotheory Frascella, Lawrence. “In 'Blue Nights,' Didion Delivers A Mother’s Eulogy.” NPR, NPR, 30 Oct. 2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/10/29/141690686/in-blue-nights-didion-delivers-a-mothers- eulogy. Heller, Zoe, and Leslie Jamison. “Should Writers Avoid Sentimentality?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 23 Sept. 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/books/review/should-writers-avoid- sentimentality.html. Heston, Sarah. “Sarah Heston, ‘Critical Memoir: A Recovery From Codes’ (1.1).” ASSAY, https://www.assayjournal.com/sarah-heston-critical-memoir-a-recovery-from-codes- 11.html. Howard, June. “What Is Sentimentality?” American Literary History, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999, pp. 63– 81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/490077. Karr, Mary. The Art of Memoir. Harper Perennial. 2015. Keehn, Robin. Not A Leg To Stand On. Tea Leaves Press. 2016. Kusek, Robert. “Blue Is (Not) the Warmest Colour: Contradictions of Grieving in Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.” Brno Studies in English, vol. 43, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 171–183. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5817/BSE2017-1-10. Luckhurst, Roger. “Reflections on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.” New Formations, vol. 67, no. 67, Jan. 2009, pp. 91–100. doi:10.3898/newf.67.08.2009. “Magical Thinking.” Oxford English Dictionary. Malecka, Katarzyna. “The Self Lost, The Self Adjusted: Forming a New Identity in Bereavement Memoirs By American Women”. doi: 10.1515/stap-2015-0030 McNamara, Robert. “Joan Didion, Essayist and Author Who Defined New Journalism.” ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, 4 Feb. 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/joan-didion-4582406. Menand, Louis. “The Radicalization of Joan Didion.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 9 July 2019, https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/out-of-bethlehem. Muggli, Mark Z. "The Poetics of Joan Didion's Journalism." American Literature 59.3 (1987): 402-21. Web. Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2016. Olney, James. Memory and Narrative. University of Chicago Press. 1998. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation. University of California Press. 1992. Pp 110-140. Rak, J. “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, vol. 37, no. 3-4, 2004, pp. 483–504.
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End Notes
1 “Non-binary” is used in relation to gender identity. 2 Heston references St. Augustine’s Confessions and Jacques Derrida’s Jacques Derrida as applicable to her notion of “critical autobiography.” 3 Diamond, Sam. “American Truth and Hysteria: The Evolution of Joan Didion -.” 3, 2 May 2018, https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/joan-didion-truth-and-hysteria-in-america/. 4 Reference Joan Didion’s essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” 5 Scott Parker’s Conversations with Joan Didion, Emma Brockes “The Guardian”, etc. 6 The meaning of “contemporary, timeless amalgamation” is representative of Didion’s ability to create a text so universally applicable that it feels contemporary in any moment it is read. 7 Didion, Joan. “On Keeping a Notebook”, Didion, Joan. “Why I Write”. 8 By using the term “translating”, I am suggesting that her memoir has been translated into other languages. I am also suggesting that her memoir has been translated into other modes such as theatre. 9 “Why I Write”, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, The Year of Magical Thinking. 10 By “literal translation”, I am suggesting that she is translating memory into text. 11 By “metaphorical translation”, I am suggesting that Didion is mentally processing her grieving emotions, but is not literally translating her emotions or memories into text. 12 NIH.gov: “Excessive Intellectualization.” 13 Chapters 3-5, The Year of Magical Thinking. 14Woodward, Kathleen. “Feeling Frail and National Statistical Panic: Joan Didion in Blue Nights and the American Economy at Risk.” 15 Heston examines Louis Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses to conceptualize her notion of “truth”. 16 Kusek, Robert. “Blue Is (Not) the Warmest Colour: Contradictions of Grieving in Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.” Brno Studies in English, vol. 43, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 171–183. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5817/BSE2017-1-10.
17 Cusk, Rachel. “Blue Nights by Joan Didion – Review.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 11 Nov. 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/11/blue-nights-joan-didion-review. 18 Brockes, “The Guardian”. 19 Brockes. “The Guardian.” 20 Cusk, Rachel. “Blue Nights by Joan Didion – Review.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 11 Nov. 2011, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/11/blue-nights-joan-didion-review.
21 Didion. “Why I Write”. New York Times, 1976. 22 See Brockes, Cuesk, etc. 23 The Dutch Shea Jr. characterization by John Gregory Dunne (pg. 51) of The Year of Magical Thinking. 24 “In” describes both within the course of the memoir and also “in” refers to Didion’s writing process. 25 “palatable” is used with the second definition of the Merriam Webster Dictionary as reference: “agreeable or acceptable to the mind.” 26 In the term “writer’s consciousness”, I am referring to both her writer’s relationship with John prior to his passing and the idea that I present later on about Quintana’s aversion to reading her mother and father’s work. 27Brockes, Emma. “Joan Didion: Life after Death.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 Oct. 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/21/joan-didion-blue-nights. 28 Brockes, Emma. “Joan Didion: Life after Death.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 Oct. 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/21/joan-didion-blue-nights. 29 Didion. “Why I Write” 30 OED entry: “n. [compare French la pensée magique (1934 (several authors), in Revue Française de Psychanalyse 7)]”