Joan Didion, the Memoir, and the Second Great Depression

Let me begin by stating that Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, is almost unbearably brilliant. It won the National Book Award in November 2005 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In clipped, precise sentences, Didion describes the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the harrowing grief she endured in the following year — during much of which the couple’s only daughter was hospitalized with what would prove to be her own fatal illness. Intertwined with Didion’s own experience is a line attributed to Sir Gawain of King Arthur’s court, “I tell you I shall not live two days,” which becomes the book’s refrain; lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, and other poets bring additional focus to the reader’s shared experience of Didion’s grief. Anyone who has lost someone greatly loved will recognize part of herself in Didion’s thinking during this time, notably her inability to give away Dunne’s shoes — believing with powerful, irrational hope that he would return and need them.

So what bothered me about this account, on a second reading? I could not, until I neared the end of the book, say exactly why I felt disconcerted in a way different from simply reliving my own grief as I read about Didion’s. She names places, favorite restaurants, vacation trips taken, items of clothing with reportorial accuracy, no less so than in her previous prose works. How I felt about the book, I realized with anger and shame, had become colored by the fact that The Year of Magical Thinking is a distinctly privileged, indeed upper-class experience of illness and grief. John Gregory Dunne’s funeral took place in New York City, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; the couple’s close friend Calvin Trillin, a New Yorker writer, spoke at the service. The scarf Dunne left draped over a chair was cashmere; Didion recounts extensive foreign travel and expensive restaurant meals; Dunne was pals, as Didion tells it, with one of the doormen at their apartment building, and had a running joke with him about whether Osama bin Laden might be hiding in the building’s penthouse, “maisonette” (whatever that is), or fitness room. Most tellingly, when Didion’s daughter collapses in California, Didion has the financial security to have her medevaced across the country, on a multi-legged journey, back to a neurology institute in New York.

Of course Didion did what any mother would, and should, have done: she used every means available to ensure that her daughter had the best possible care. No reader can fault her for this. But in between mentions of the hospital at UCLA and New York’s Rusk Institute, in between discussions with cardiology specialists at Beth Israel hospital, one wonders how radically these experiences would have differed had this been a more ordinary couple. What would a woman do if she and her husband were not both acclaimed authors, and there was no doorman’s log of entry and exit to reread obsessively in her attempt to understand her husband’s death? What if the daughter and her husband had had to remain in exile across the continent, without the money to transport the daughter anywhere, much less to a specialist institute? What if, indeed, any one of these parties had been without insurance — or belonged to an HMO that stipulated access to only certain doctors and treatment facilities?

In a destroyed economy that analysts are slowly beginning to acknowledge as a second great depression like the one before World War II, it may be increasingly difficult for the reader to relate fully to reportage of such immense privilege. That is not to say that Didion’s life, or accurate reporting of it, mars the book in any way; The Year of Magical Thinking will always remain an important book, one with such power that it has been adapted for the stage — Didion has been played variously by Vanessa Redgrave and Cate Blanchett. But who plays the single mother who works two jobs, neither of which provides insurance? Film portrayals like Julia Roberts’s Erin Brockovich, or Cher as the mother in Mask, have fallen out of fashion in the new century; instead we have comedies about the sexual problems of middle-aged white men, or movies like Sex and the City 2. I predict, without a dog in the fight, that the latter will have little lasting societal or artistic impact.

No memoir can be rightly condemned for the simple fact that its author enjoys privilege. Were this the case, John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, another classic of illness and grief, might be dismissed out of hand. John Gregory Dunne’s death is not less important, nor its impact on his loved ones less profound, because he graduated from Princeton in the same year as Donald Rumsfeld. Indeed, The Year of Magical Thinking may be taken as useful evidence that not even white, heterosexual, cisgendered, upper-middle-class privilege insulates its author from the violence of grief. But recounting her actions later, Didion never stops to wonder, for example, what might have happened at UCLA had the mother been working poor, more daunted by authority, less willing to badger and harass doctors as Didion does over every detail of her daughter’s condition. Taking the book as sole evidence, one would never know the grieving woman was aware of a world outside her own, a New York other than hers, whose inhabitants might not have evenings in Paris to remember.

I will keep Didion’s book close to me and return to it again; I believe that she understands and articulates grief with unparalleled excellence, and my own magical thinking is that, thereby, she understands me. But I wish I could also read the stories of patients on Medicaid, of those without insurance at all, who go through similar ordeals. The single mother with the two jobs might be Virginia Woolf’s proverbial “Shakespeare’s sister”; she, too, might be able to illuminate human experience in haunting and important ways. Will she have time, I wonder, or the sense that her words count? The assurance of being heard is in itself a special type of privilege. Who now collects or considers the stories of those who are not already successful novelists? For the moment, the answer seems to lie with newspaper and newsmagazine bloggers, or with people who somehow find time, strength, and will to track their own journeys via Web 2.0. I will not stop hoping that the Shakespeare’s sisters of this millennium will be published in book form. Not either-or, but both-and: the excellence of polished prose writers like Didion, but also the unfiltered, often uncomfortable truths of that increasingly large category: the rest of us.