Joan Didion in Several Films,

Joan Didion

In several films, "Momento," "Ground Hog Day," and "50 First Dates," the main characters wake up each morning and start life anew with no memories from the previous day. They are like lower animals where each moment is new, fresh. However, such cases are rare for humans. Unlike other living forms, people either remember consciously or unconsciously events that occur from day-to-day. In fact, recent trauma therapy deals with the fact that parts of a person's body "remembers." A therapist said that each time her female client spoke of her father, she would unknowingly rub her arm. She did not remember how he used to squeeze her arm when she was young, until she did what he asked. Such memories give humans the ability to learn and develop -- each day they can be more whole than the day before. According to psychotherapists such as Erik Erikson and Roger Gould, not only do humans change from day-to-day, but go through and mature from one stage of life through the next -- from infancy to death.

The scientist Isaac Asimov once pointed out that every mammal lives at a pace that can be measured by its heartbeat. Each has a heart-rate in inverse ratio to its size and longevity. The heart of the tiny shrew's beats at an amazing speed throughout its short life. The huge elephant's heart pumps quite slowly, but for many years. Whether its life is measured in days or in decades, each mammal is allowed approximately one billion heartbeats, and then it dies. A human is different. A person's heart does beat at about the pace it should for its size. Yet, people use up its allotment of one billion beats when about 20 years old, and then live on for almost two billion more.

These three facts -- humans remember daily events, live in stages and exist beyond their allotted physical time -- make individuals completely different, because they are able to separate their consciousness or thought processes from feeling or instincts. Thus, when they move into adulthood, it is like humans are going into a second life that is harmonious with Erickson's last three "ages of man" where the potential benefits/challenges are ego intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. stagnation, and integrity vs. despair. This is consistent with the belief that life traumas frequently are "constructive confrontations" that challenge a person and provide the chance for learning new skills and personal growth. Each stage is a turning point where a person can expand and change.

Based on this concept, Roger Gould similarly recognizes that individuals in their middle-age years must cope with major transitions. Gould suggests that transformation is the central concept of adult human development. People have an inborn drive to grow, develop and change. He identified several changes that could take place over a person's adult life: Early 30s, questioning what life is all about and whether one is doing the right thing; 35-43, continuing to question and aware of time limitations; 43-50, resigned to finite time and increased interest in spouse, friends and social activities; 55-60, mellowing and decreased negativeness. He proposed a developmental theory based on the ability to separate oneself from the false assumptions of childhood. Once we make the split from youthful longings and desires to more mature pursuits, he argues, people can strive for a fuller, more independent consciousness, which is the mark of adulthood.

Both Erikson's and Gould's theories contradict the thought by Freud that an individual's personality and sense of self are set for life in childhood.

The changes that middle age can bring, can vary widely: From a loss of a job for a short period of time, to a major illness and recovery, to a divorce, to a death of a parent or worse to the death of a husband or child. For Joan Didion, the loss was monumental -- her husband dies in a matter of seconds when her daughter was unconscious in the hospital. Through all their middle ages, Didion and her husband were a true couple. Both writers, they worked at home, spent all their time together, read each other's work, completed each other's thoughts, and carried on a continuous conversation as one person would. Then, Quintana, her daughter, dies, as well. Some people, like Didion (in her early 70s), somehow find the strength to cope -- albeit with much agony and despair. Others do not. In an interview, Didion states, "I didn't die. My life has to continue. I don't have an option," (Grossman, 2005, 56). Yet, she did.

Didion relates in the book that no one prepares a person to cope with such challenges. When growing up, especially in the United States, children are usually kept from death. It is not something that people normally speak about. Then, when individuals get older, they are suddenly confronted by a loss of an acquaintance and then a friend.

In another article she tells the interviewer (Matousek, 2007, p.27) about the American way of grief: "evasiveness posing as courage...Nobody ever admits that the physical and mental effects of loss are actually happening." She further relates in her book how she felt cut free of "any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

In the Year of Magical Thinking, Didion accomplishes the purpose of a true author -- to let others see into a life that has yet to confront them. It is an instructional book, showing readers what happens when a loved one dies and answering questions that they are too afraid to ask someone else. "Is it okay to feel pity for oneself?" "Will I be able to ever set foot again in our favorite restaurant, or listen to the music to which we danced, or smell his aftershave lotion on another man?" "Does it hurt more because you two were inseparable, or does is painful for everyone?" "How painful?" "Will I be able to go on?"

Magical Thinking reviews the first year of Didion's life after her husband's death. Magical Thinking it displays pity, cowardice, bravery and strength. As a writer, she is able to stand away from herself at the same time as within herself. Readrers see her from the outside at the same time as seeing her from the pain inside.

She allows everyone to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief, and her body as it shakes with sobs and pain. The readers see how she uses her words, her writing, to come to grips with the raw emotions within and begin to heal. "Writing is the only way I've ever gained clarity," she says. "I don't go through life with a lot of clear-formed thoughts. it's not till I sit down and write that I really know what I think."

Unlike other books, Magical Thinking is not to dissect and talk about in a book club. it's a book to experience, to feel, to learn from as she is every moment. For example, she now asks herself, "Who was she to denigrate other people's self-pity in the past?" In fact, from the first lines, she is concerned with "The question of self-pity." How to evade it? How to acknowledge it? How to win over it?"

Further, her grief is not "by the book" in the sequences noted by scholars: denial, (this isn't happening to me!); anger (why is this happening to me?); bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if...), depression (I don't care anymore) and finally acceptance (I'm ready for whatever comes). Instead, her feelings come in waves, from bad to good, irresolution to resolution, fear to bravery.

She captures the extreme helplessness that is characteristic of modern grief -- the irony of reading Emily Post on the Internet only strengthens this impression, as it is difficult to think of a woman sitting by her computer crying as the monitor glows green. She searches for answers in poems, novels, all of which were apparently of some use to her, as well as the "professional literature" of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers after Freud, that had little to say to her.

Didion's story of her in mourning is mostly a story of her growing self-awareness of the futility of attempting to control events that are beyond any person's control. For that, she knows, was one of her greatest faults. Now, she realizes how futile such a desire is. What totally throws her off is how she was caught off guard. Didn't fate know that nothing like this should happen to her? However, how could she been so blind? How many times did her husband have to tell her what was coming, to prepare her for what was going to happen. However, she was so wrapped in her world of complacency, she refused to hear, to recognize.

She recalls his insistence that they go to Paris in November -- this was his last chance, he said -- and how a few nights before dying he dictated to her an idea for a book he was planning. "You can use it if you want to," he said. The horror of Dunne's death is that it fixes the deceased in time. Frustrated and full of self-reproach, Didion is left to look and keep on looking for fresh possibilities in the past: missed clues, wrong turns, alternate endings, places to correct the record, to, as she says, "get it right."