While reading Joan Didions The Year of Magical Thinking I got the impression that a lot of this was part of something Didion would have written anyway regardless of it being put into a cohesive book form. The narrative follows Didion in her struggling with the grief with the sudden loss of her husband John Gregory Dunne and the near fatal accident that caused her daughter Quintana brain damage and constant hospitalization throughout the narrative. In the beginning of the narrative Didion explains on page 7 "I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words, of sentences, of paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am or have become...This is a case which I need more than the words to find the meaning. This is the case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable if only for myself." This narrative seemed so personal for Didion that the book seemed like it was writing herself at times. Where writing the book literally allowed her to get past her own beliefs as she was writing it in order to see objectively what she was thinking for the first time. An example of this occurred on page 56 when Didion was talking about a passage from a book written by a Doctor who studied the affects of grief had on his patients. The first part of the passage she included from this doctor's studies goes "we help the patient to review the circumstances of death- how it occurred, the patients reaction to the news, and to viewing the body etc." The passage from this doctor went on to describe how he let's the patient free their inner emotions to discover the actual relationship this person had with the deceased. Then Didion goes on and becomes upset and asks questions to this unknown doctor in her writing "where you with me 'and the one who died' at Punchbowl in Honolulu four months before it happened?..." She goes on further in quoting what the doctor said in the passage "I don't need to 'Review the circumstances of the death' I was there. I didn't 'get the news' I didn't 'view' the body. I was there." Then she turns on herself "I catch myself, I stop. I realize that I am directing irrational anger toward the entirely unknown Dr. Volkan in Charlottesville" This was a moment when Didion was actually in the process of writing this book when she caught herself directing 'irrational' anger toward an unknown doctor. All writers go through a process where you need to start off writing something to get the book started somewhere whether they include it or not but Didion actually had to write the book itself in order to find out what she herself was going to say next. This moment came after how many months of writing before she could include what she actually had to say about it within the book. It's also important to realize that this Doctor she was reading had to sit down and write what she was reading just like Didion sat down to write this book so it was almost like she was arguing with him directly about her husband or at least with what this doctor had written.
It was obvious from this that even when writing the book that she was still not over John's death. But there were many times when Didion in a more removed tone talked about her denial of John's death in that even during the autopsy to try and find out how he died she had the idea that they were trying to find out somehow if he was even dead at all. An interesting part of the book was that she was so caught up in denial of the present that she treated the past like it was still happening. She talked about ways of trying to go over her memories with John as if she had the power to change the past in order to prevent the future. She treated the past like it was still alive like she treated the written passage from the unknown doctor as if he was talking about her directly. Didion used the term 'vortex' to describe these boughts of grief in her struggles to disassociate her memories with John from the present. Didion's writing was very intrinsic like a vortex in the way she weaved the present with the past together. I could get a clear picture of how Didion was thinking through the rhythms of her writing and how she allowed me to see her 'irrationality' even while she was writing it to get at what she really wanted to say about her experience through the experience of writing.
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