The Year of Magical Thinking

After Quintana awakes in the hospital, she is transferred to a rehabilitation facility. She tells her mother that her memory is “mudgy” (122). She cannot remember the days leading up to Christmas when she entered the hospital for the first time. She also cannot remember speaking at her father’s funeral. Didion’s memory then slips to when the doctors insist on giving the unconscious Quintana a tracheostomy and take her off the EEG. Didion is vehemently opposed to the trach. It is not until later that she realizes her resistance is rooted in the same magical thinking that led her to believe her husband might one day return. By putting in the trach, Didion’s subconscious believes that Quintana’s ability to wake up and leave the hospital will be postponed.

In the hospital, Quintana is surrounded by other patients. One man is visited by several coworkers who all try to explain the source of his brain injury on a construction site. One of the men remarks on the ordinariness of the day. Another patient in the room has a similar story. He suddenly was unable to speak while sitting and visiting with his children.

Didion arms herself with as much knowledge as possible. She learns the names of hospital bacteria and corrals the doctors and nurses to do her bidding. They are frustrated by her pushiness, but she is desperate to exert some control. She waits to see if Quintana will develop septic shock again. Her memory is transported to a pool behind her home in Brentwood Park. This memory unlocks another memory, and Didion feels a flood of memory and questions that cause her to query whether certain actions on her part might have brought different outcomes for her daughter and husband.

In April, Quintana is deemed safe to travel to a New York hospital by Medivac. As they fly to New York, one of the paramedics takes pictures out of the window and refers to what he sees as the Grand Canyon, even after Didion corrects him. Didion acknowledges a lifelong struggle with always needing to be right. She fixates on a sentence in one of Dunne’s books that she believes might be grammatically incorrect.

Quintana begins to recover, and Didion realizes that, just as her daughter will need to regain her independence and be on her own, Didion will need to rediscover her own independence. As she begins to start tackling long-postponed projects, Didion finds herself confronting her own grief. She is in mourning. She realizes that she has been so focused on Quintana that she has not been able to navigate a normal grieving process. Everything has been on hold.

Didion flips through a book honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Dunne’s graduating class at Princeton that arrived while she was in California. She struggles to recall Dunne talking about Princeton. She researches the origin of a private joke between herself and Dunne and wishes for the opportunity to talk to him about what she finds. She finds a list Dunne wrote in pencil a couple of nights before he died. She wonders at how faint the pencil marks are; the sight conjures a memory of being told that death is not black and white. After coming back from California, Didion’s close friend and one of Dunne’s family members pass away. She thinks about how even in their experiences, after periods of prolonged illness, the difference between death and life was exactly black and white. To better understand the divide, she rereads the story of Admetus. At the end of the story, Admetus’s wife comes back from death, and Didion questions whether she would hold up under Dunne’s scrutiny should he return.

Didion asserts that loved ones see signs and foreshadowing in everything. She rereads Dunne’s books and they bring forth new meaning. In Harps, Dunne recalls telling Didion in 1987 that the doctor told him he had the possibility of a major cardiac event. Didion has no recollection of this conversation. Dunne underwent angioplasty that year. For Dunne, this was a message—the prediction for how he would die. For Didion, it was a successful intervention, something to leave behind.

Didion begins dreaming again the summer after Dunne’s death. In one dream, a braided belt breaks in her hands. She interprets the dream as a representation of the guilt she feels over her husband’s passing. She feels responsible. In another dream, Dunne boards a plane, leaving Didion behind. She feels anger in the dream and recognizes that she also feels anger at Dunne in real life for leaving her alone.

Didion then presents a succession of material items linked to Dunne. A set of dinnerware that belonged to Dunne’s mother becomes her exclusive favorite, and she begins washing the dishwasher when it is only a quarter full so that she can ensure she always has one of the plates to use. She realizes that she and Dunne did not write letters to each other because they were always together, but she considers the gifts he gave her over the years: an alarm clock now broken, a set of pens now gone dry. These gifts, both useless, could not be thrown away. Didion recalls another gift from Dunne. He was reading aloud to her from one of her own books, trying to figure out how a complex passage worked technically. After finishing the passage, Dunne closed the book and complimented Didion as a writer, causing her to cry. This was less than a month before his death.