Summary Of The Year Of Magical Thinking By Joan Didion

In the memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion rejects grief as a simple bereavement, but rather exemplifies the grieving process as a temporary state of mental illness. The experiences of her husband’s death and her daughter’s sickness left Didion questioning and pondering her own sanity, denial, yearning, and grief leading to the year of magical thinking where all irrational thoughts made sense. Joan Didion portrays grief as a psychological illness through her magical thinking of delusional desires to control and change fate, her constantly haunting vortex effects to overcome the tragedies, and her literary allusions and intertextuality to cope with the grief.
One of the many ways Didion portrays grief as a mental illness is the
As a child, Didion had been trained in times of trouble to “read, learn, work it up, go to the literature” (Didion 44) revealing how significant literature, writing, and reading had played a role in her life. Didion expresses her personal feelings and emotions of grief and despair by alluding to a plethora of articles, novels, and poems. Didion references to the Bible, Matthew 7:3-6 and “the mote and the beam” when she is frustrated with John’s life and death situation at the hospital declaring that people clearly are able to see the small speck of sin in their brothers, but people don’t consider the massive unrighteousness they commit that is all overseen by God, “A mote in the eye of God” (qtd in Didion 15). The mote represents our brother's sins while the beam represents the people’s implying that people should examine and care for their own lives that are full of sin before condemning others for their sins. Didion reflects on the quote at the time of impatience and frustration to refrain from blaming others for her husband’s death. The sudden death of her husband along with Quintana’s myriad health issues left Didion in an ultimate abandonment of the hope is reflected in Didion’s citation of Delmore Schwartz poem “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day” when she has trouble solving the puzzle that leads to her self-pitiful wail “a motherless child.” Since
In the memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking written by Joan Didion, she concludes that grief is a state of mental illness through personal experience with the occurrences of her husband’s death and her daughter’s sickness. Despite the magical thinking and vortex effects holding her back, Didion utilizes literature to learn from the tragedies and accept to overcome their fates to be able to move forward in life. (Word Count