Communication Breakdown?

In her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion explores the nature of grief and its impact on the human psyche. After the unexpected death of her husband, and more importantly companion, Didion is left to grapple with the struggles of her everyday, “ordinary” life and the overwhelming desire to remain strong in the face of her daughter’s ultimately fatal illness. For any person, the events which took place in Didion’s life in a matter of months would be an incredibly hard burden to shoulder; for anyone, the toll of the stress would be both physically and emotionally incapacitating. Yet, Didion was not afforded the opportunity to “fall apart” when the need arose, and for that, I must say, I truly admire her grit. Perhaps my bias is shaped by my admiration for her might in the face of such suffering. I truly cannot image the amount of pain Didion must have suffered.

With that said, I also enjoyed her novel on a literary and analytical level. Didion is obvious a lover of literature, of the power of words to explore, enlighten, and elucidate. Yet, in her memoir, words become a source of healing and a place of solitude. So often in life, we use words to fill empty spaces and we lose their meanings. The symbol connected to the word is undermined by our frequent and irreverent use of the word. However, Didion is fully aware of the impact of the words she chooses. Her life’s work and her understanding of the world around her rely on her ability to communicate her emotion through syntax and word choice. The need to write, read, comprehend, and share meaningful words becomes not only a means of maintaining some semblance of control, but also a sign of normalcy.

Didion has, at the time of the book's publication, lived a year after the death of one of the two most important people in her life; finding her place in the ordinary through communication has been her only constant. Ironically, Didion uses her ordinary abilities to express the extremely inordinate circumstances of her life in the previous months. Even when she speaks of her "mudgy" period, Didion is able to express her apprehensions and desperate fear through her voracious consumption of medical texts and her subsequent pestering of medical professionals. In this way, Didion's ordinary talents of communication, even through experiences so horrifically tragic, are elevated to a level of reverence and idealized awe.