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‘You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,’ she begins. So it was that she and her writer husband, John Gregory Dunne, were about to dine in their New York apartment when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Didion called an ambulance and her husband was taken to hospital. Even describing the events of this terrible evening, her self-knowledge has an edge of humour:
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ I heard myself say to the doctor. The doctor looked at the social worker. ‘It’s okay,’ the social worker said. ‘She’s a pretty cool customer.’
She mentions being ‘too offhand and too elliptical’, but this book is neither. Every reader who has mourned will recognise the way in which certain events are played over and over again, like a litany: would it have made any difference if X, did the person have a presentiment of death when they said Y? Most of us, when we imagine someone close to us dying, envisage a void. Didion tells how, actually, this void is filled with a clamour of what ifs? She keeps coming back to the memory of a distant summer, when, after writing all day, she and Dunne would go swimming in the sea together. Only towards the end of the book does she disclose that it was at the end of this same golden summer that Dunne’s heart condition was diagnosed. The serpent was in the garden, all along.
At the same time as her husband was dying, their only daughter was in intensive care, in a coma, suffering from septic shock. This part of the story makes the book not only sad, but harrowing. The Year of Magical Thinking isn’t one to take to the beach, or to cheer a long autumn evening, but it deserves to be widely read because it is powerful, moving and true.
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