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The Writerly Reader in Memoir: Inter/
subjectivity and Joan Didion's The Year
of Magical Thinking
Devika Chawla
Published online: 15 Sep 2008.
To cite this article: Devika Chawla (2008) The Writerly Reader in Memoir: Inter/subjectivity
and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking , Review of Communication, 8:4, 377-394, DOI:
10.1080/15358590802074704
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The Review of Communication
Vol. 8, No. 4, October 2008, pp. 377394
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The Writerly Reader in Memoir: Inter/
subjectivity and Joan Didion’s The Year
of Magical Thinking
Devika Chawla
In recent years, much attention has been given to the construction, writing, and reading
of the memoir as a literary genre. Debates surrounding life-writing have been invariably
concerned with narrative truth because autobiographical narratives center on subjectivity, identity, reflexivity, and representation (of self and other). Moreover, matters of
self and subjectivity are inherent to the writing, reading, audiencing, and experiencing of
autobiographical writing. This paper is a reflective engagement with Joan Didion’s The
Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir which won the National Book Award for non-fiction
in 2005. The book is the story of the year after the sudden death of Joan Didion’s writer
husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, and how circumstances compelled the author
to create a magical psychic space in which she could believe that her husband was still
alive. My goal in this essay is three-fold. I engage with what overtly seems like a trauma
narrative of personal grief to show the reader/myself how life-writing swings the tensions
between the public and the private as well as the personal and cultural, thereby giving us
a picture of the ‘‘becoming’’ self in the writing of memoir. I then turn my attention to an
examination of how this tension enables the creation of what Philippe Lejeune refers to as
the ‘‘autobiographical pact’’ between the memoirist who writes her self into being and the
reader who reads her ‘‘selves’’ in association with the writer. In discussing this, I show
how these two elements are crucial to understanding the intersubjective nature of
autobiography and life-writing.
Keywords: Autobiography; Intersubjectivity; Narrative Theory; Life Writing; Memoir
Devika Chawla (Ph.D., Purdue University, 2004) is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies
at Ohio University. Correspondence to: School of Communication, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA.
Email: chawla@ohio.edu. The author would like to thank Professors Raymie McKerrow, Lenore Langsdorf,
Amardo Rodriguez, Jeffrey St. John, and Caryn Medved for their thoughtful guidance in the completion of this
paper.
ISSN 1535-8593 (online) # 2008 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/15358590802074704
378 D. Chawla
Introduction
In the opening stanzas of her memoir1 The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Joan
Didion provides us with an introduction to the story that she unravels in the pages
that follow. It therefore seems appropriate to begin my essay with her words as she
tells us where this will take her and us.
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It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.
Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of
December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did)
experience, at the table where he and I just sat down to dinner in the living room of
our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.
Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an
intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center’s Singer Division, at that time a
hospital on the East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more commonly known
as ‘‘Beth Israel North,’’ or ‘‘the old Doctor’s Hospital,’’ where what had seemed a
case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to the emergency room on
Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. (p. 6)
Having given us the literal facts, Didion begins to situate her identity as a writer
clearly as she writes her memoir. She answers the readers’ call when she directly tells
us why she felt compelled to write and who she is, thereby showing the reader why
her writing is necessary and crucial.
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then
months that cut loose any fixed idea that I ever had about death, about illness,
about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and
children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not
deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I
have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what
I wrote began to get published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident
in the rhythms of words and sentences and 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, yet this is a case in which I wish I had
instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital
editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time,
show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you
pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same
lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a
case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for
myself. (pp. 68)
These powerful words drew me into Didion’s memoir: words that I first read in
reviews as the book was released, and then as one of its first public readers. I selected
a book which focuses upon death, a terrain of human experience with which I am as
yet unfamiliar. I have*fortunately or unfortunately*escaped experiencing death in
close proximity. I am nevertheless aware that death is ever-looming and ever-present,
because as humans we live ever-conscious of our mortality and for ‘‘the individual
life, death is the ultimate and irrevocable closure’’ (Carr, 1986, p. 81). Death is, in
other words, very much a continuing rhythm of life. Therefore, it is with a level of
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379
deliberateness that I choose to focus on what is for now an unfamiliar domain of
experience and on what roles readers bring to such experiences.
My interest in The Year of Magical Thinking did not sustain only because it is an
unknown sphere. I am partial to writings that are autobiographical in nature, and
also to writer-autobiographies. As a person interested in exploring writing as an
epistemology, I find readings such as these necessary for reflecting on my own writing
practices. I read these books not because I believe that they will teach me how to
write, but I am convinced that they allow me to travel into the cultural, personal,
social, and historic worlds of others involved in a writing life. I also adhere to the
notion that autobiographies have the capability to reveal as much about an author’s
audience as they do about him or her. For this reason, autobiographies should be read
as cultural documents, and not merely personal ones (see Sayre, 1994, American Lives:
An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing). I am most interested in how the personal
and the cultural are intricately interwoven, and how memoirs often articulate a
symbiosis. In short, I find moments of truth, confusion, convergence, and divergence
in reading what writers have to say about their lives, their writing lives, and therefore
the cultural presents they inhabit. In this essay, I loop around these matters as I work
through the tensions between the personal and the cultural as they are resurrected in
this book. In particular, I argue that Didion’s reliance on a static and fragmentary
mode of temporal narration opens up to dialogue and collaboration what is a very
personal quest. Alongside, I examine the book in light of contemporary discussions
about autobiography, of the goals it serves, and of how this book encourages the
reader to become a writerly-reader*a collaborator in the autobiographical pact. In
fact, the style and the form I un/consciously adopt in this paper mirrors Didion’s
topical, impressionistic, non-linear reading and writing of her own life, ‘‘showing’’
how this essay (as a reading) might illustrate the autobiographical pact between
writer and reader. Finally, I show how the aforementioned elements are crucial to
understanding the intersubjective nature of autobiography/life-writing.
The Year of Magical Thinking is certainly a writer’s memoir. It is the story of a
writer, a woman, a wife, and a mother who experienced the death of a spouse and a
child within the span of two years. To me, the memoir juxtaposes multiple parallel
narratives; I find three most significant and thus worth mentioning as I proceed into
this analysis. The first narrative, easiest to discern, is Didion’s reflective and
retrospective attempt to understand the sudden death of her spouse of 40 years,
the writer John Gregory Dunne. In the backdrop, what functions as the second key
narrative is an intimate portrait of their 40-year-long marriage. A third narrative,
parallel to these, is the story of their daughter Quintana’s illness, which began before
John died and progressed into Quintana’s ultimate demise 18 months after her father.
Even though Quintana’s death remains peripheral and more or less unacknowledged
in this memoir, the story of her illness functions as a story which allowed Didion to
postpone her grief and mourning over her husband’s death while undertaking the
care of her child. Didion crafts together a memoir which I can only acknowledge as
multi-genre in craft. It intermingles reportage, retrospection, ethnographic detail, and
other cultural texts and textures. It is written in the present with a sense of urgency
380 D. Chawla
and immediacy about the recent past*so much so that the writer and reader both
feel as if they are both there in the then, and here in the now. The reader becomes a
co-creator in both the writing experience and in the recollected experience*herself
becoming a conduit between the public and private experience of death.
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Rescuing the Self in Memoir: A Cultural/Public Act
There is no doubt that The Year of Magical Thinking confirms the deeply personal
nature of life-writing. At the same time, this book is intensely public in being a public
requiem to a marriage and a husband in ‘‘writing.’’ It performs tensions between the
cultural and personal and between the public and private, while showing us a person’s
urgent narrative quest to rescue herself from a sudden tragic circumstance. It answers
many wide-ranging but also a few specific questions: How does someone who is a
writer and was married to a writer identify, experience, understand, outlive, and
articulate the loss of a spouse? In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion presents us
with one narrative portrait of such loss, grief, and un/coping. This is not to say that a
writer experiences loss in any different, peculiar, or similar way to another person. I
would argue that this book is crucial because it shows us how one person, a writer,
accesses the medium that she is enmeshed in, and indeed embodies, in order to
explore her grief. In my reading, the story is not textually narrated with the intent of
exoticizing the events of human trauma and death; rather, I believe its intent is
epideictic. The story calls for an epideictic understanding because it asks the reader
to think about what they have just witnessed (read), thereby memorializing the
event*in this case the death of a spouse.
Rhetorically, I consider the story epideictic, but is the writer’s goal here to attain
narrative order*a goal, process, and product of a lot of therapeutic writing? This
question is open for debate among those involved in exploring narrative therapy and
therapeutic writing, about which there exists a plethora of contemporary research
(Ezzy, 1998; Frank, 1995; Hyden, 1997; Rimmon-Kenan, 2002). In her memoir
Didion enters some of these conversations by perusing literature on grief, melancholy,
and mourning, yet her own narrative veers away from being a grief narrative alone,
because the person in need of healing in this case is a person who is deeply familiar
with, indeed, submerged in a world of stories and writing. I would argue that, in a
curious way, this memoir shows a ‘‘narrative betrayal,’’ whereby words, plots, and
stories become simply inadequate to describe experience. In this way, this book
captures the essence of crises because all crises ‘‘in some way involve a struggle with
language’’ (Chandler, 1989, p. 4). Specifically, Didion is unable to comprehend and
transfer the materiality and corporeality of her grief into ordered language and words,
and yet, ironically, words are her only recourse. As a reader, this memoir brings the
limits of language, words, stories, and narrative to the forefront. Alternatively, it also
reinforces language’s power by showing, in a Burkean sense, how literacy acts can
function as ‘‘strategies for living’’ for individuals (Burke, 1973, p. 293).
The very act of writing serves not only as a healing ritual, but as an affirmation of
life because it recovers the writer, and recalls and reinvents the writer into being. On a
The Writerly Reader
381
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simple level this is the story of recovery, grief, and loss, but on a more complex level
this is a story about ‘‘life.’’ In writing, Didion seeks to resurrect and lay to rest her
husband. In writing, she resurrects her self*a salute to her own aliveness. What
readers receive is a personal and public anatomy of grief, which is undoubtedly one of
the most universal of human experiences.
The story begins in the present. It begins with the words Didion wrote four days
after the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, due to a coronary.
These are words that she only resumed writing nine months after his death:
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity. (p. 3)
These lines signal finality and finiteness and are a tragic refrain in the book. I
continue to be touched by them because they embody the push and pull between the
continuity of memory (even when it is continuously reinterpreted in the present) and
the finality of death (with its continuity of interpretation). The narrative takes us into
the details of the death, the paralysis, the shock, and both the singularity and yet the
everydayness of death. Simultaneously, it returns us again and again to the living and
the lived.
In this simultaneous dance lies the connection between the outside and the
inside*the personal and the cultural*which is where I believe resides the value of
this book, and more generally the worth of memoir. I am by no means suggesting that
the personal and the cultural are separate domains; rather, my concern is with how
they are entwined in life-writing. As we read along, Didion delineates how death and
life co-exist at all times, and how easily a life may end*as in, ‘‘In the midst of life we
are in death’’ (Didion, p. 5; the author attributes this to an Episcopalian saying).
For instance, Didion relives, resurrects, writes, and rewrites her memories of the
moments of her husband’s death, which took place in their living room as they were
getting ready to eat dinner*seeking refuge in narrative repetition. The repetition is
necessary in order for the reader to become sophisticated in reading the tension
between life and mortality. She relives in minute, almost excruciating, detail
her daughter’s illness, showing us how she was forced to postpone her grief for her
husband because she needed to take care of her daughter*a physical refuge that
presented itself to her, and one which she seemingly almost welcomed.
This other narrative*the story of her daughter’s illness*allows her to take us into
a profound understanding of how she carved out the ‘‘magical,’’ which was the
creation of a psychic space inside which she could continue to believe that her
husband would return. She shows how her daughter’s illness colluded to keep this
magical illusion intact. She began writing the memoir while her daughter was still
unwell because the second crisis enabled her to pretend that her husband was ‘‘away,’’
and not ‘‘gone.’’ Admittedly, all this is certainly the personal.
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382 D. Chawla
However, as readers we are escorted into the public/the cultural because Didion
shows us how she felt compelled to find public literature on grief, mourning,
melancholia, and health to apprehend her own process. I am wary of simplifying this
‘‘outward’’ movement made by her, because Didion does not bring in public materials
to illustrate the connections between her personal experience and literature on grief
simply by inserting information from psychology, poetry, prose, medicine, and even
Emily Post’s etiquette rules for funerals. She creates a collage of scraps, quotes,
passages, and references to Shakespeare, Styron, Freud, Auden, Cummings, C.S.
Lewis, and others*maneuvers that are deeply complex and multi-layered. For
instance, she turns to characters she created in previous novels*particularly
characters who mourn or grieve or live on the threshold of death*to re-explore
their grief, and thereby her own grief. She is even able to merge with the tragedies of
the novelistic characters (and deaths of these characters) in her husband’s novels and
those she herself created; she is now living her own tragedy. A good example is her
discussion of John’s novel Dutch Shea, Jr. in which the main character Dutch Shea
obsessively and compulsively relives the loss of his daughter, Cat. Didion returns to
the novel, re-reads it in moment and memory, and tells us:
I see now what I had failed to see in 1982, the year Dutch Shea, Jr. was published:
this was a novel about grief. The literature would have said that Dutch Shea was
undergoing pathological bereavement. The diagnostic signs would have been these:
He is obsessed with the moment Cat died. He plays and replays the scene, as if
rerunning it would reveal a different ending: the restaurant on Charlotte Street, the
endive salad, Cat’s lavender espadrilles, the bomb, Cat’s head in the dessert trolley.
(p. 51)
Just when Didion, surrounded by death and illness, is achingly seeking life, the
novelistic characters of her and John’s past become organic and real, conspiring in
keeping the magic of John’s return intact. All of these narrative maneuvers ultimately,
in my reading, become unconscious ways in which she survives with the semblance of
a self intact.
In these movements, Didion is able to show clearly that life-writing is no longer
exclusively a matter of representing a life from birth unto death. Instead, we are
shown, as narrative theorist Mark Freeman (2002) eloquently explains in his recent
essay, ‘‘Charting the Narrative Unconscious: Cultural Memory and the Challenge of
Autobiography,’’ how autobiography
is a matter of discerning, as best as one can, the multiple sources, both near and far,
that give rise to the self. This does not eliminate the place of the ‘‘I’’ in the telling of
the self ’s story. The project at hand whether it takes place intentionally, as in the
writing of an autobiography, or unintentionally, as in the course of living is one of
poesis, of fashioning an identity in and through these multiple sources. (p. 209)
The fashioning of identity, indeed the creation of a living identity, is clearly in place
in this memoir, and we are privy to how cultural texts, people, places, and textures
become interwoven into the fabric of memory (Freeman, 1998). As these texts and life
worlds mingle, we see the emergence of an interdependent self that illustrates most
clearly: ‘‘[N]o one is rightful possessor of his life or his death; lives are so thoroughly
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The Writerly Reader
383
entangled that each of them has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere’’
(Gusdorf, 1956/1980, pp. 2930). In The Year of Magical Thinking, I believe we
witness the emergence of the ‘‘narrative unconscious,’’ which, while referring to those
regions of our history that we have lived, nevertheless remains unthought and
untold*that is, the culturally rooted aspects of one’s history that have not become a
part of one’s story, and something incites them into being (Freeman, 2002).
The sources Didion accesses are pieces of information on grief in medicine, in
popular culture, in poetry, in literature, and even in sceneries/geographies which she
then merges with her experiences of death. Her inclusion of all these ‘‘outside’’
materials*even sidestepping these materials to tread into others*allows the reader
to enter the story because she moves us beyond her personal life into the shared life
of culture. In other words, we attempt, alongside Didion, to understand her grief
and grief itself, and her self-pity and self-pity itself. Consider the following words
toward the end of the book when she writes about self-pity:
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.
People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our
thinking for signs of it . . .. We understand the aversion most of us have to
‘‘dwelling on it.’’ Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as
unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. ‘‘A single person is missing for you,
and the whole world is empty,’’ Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in
Western Attitudes toward Death . . .. Self-pity remains both the most common and
the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness
accepted as given . . .. I never saw a wild thing/sorry for itself, D. H. Lawrence wrote,
in a much-quoted four-line homily that turns out on examination to be free of any
but tendentious meaning. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough/without
ever having felt sorry for itself.
This may be what Lawrence (or we) would prefer to believe about wild things, but
consider the dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate. Consider the
geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and
die. In fact, the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need to feel sorry for
themselves. Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that
made up their life*both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are
broken) insignificant connections*have all vanished. (pp. 192193)
In these stanzas, we are shown a portrait of grief that begins externally*in the
culture out there*and moves into the personal, showing us the personal and cultural
nature of the memoir. Didion’s grief is a shared grief, perhaps temporally distanced
from many, but it is shared by human beings from the past and readers of the
moment. This sharing accomplishes a key objective of autobiography as being the
story of a distinct culture (in this case grief) written in individual characters and from
within (Olney, 1980). As she does this, Didion illustrates the interdependent,
dynamic, and fluid notion of identity which is the central force of autobiography*
because in writing out her own grief the writer is authoring a new identity, one that is
bereft of a spouse, but one that is still living. It is here that I find it appropriate to
discuss the genre of autobiography and its intricate relationship with subjectivity,
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384 D. Chawla
which I believe is one of the key theoretical values of this book*for readers and
critics of autobiography.
Autobiographies are nothing if not acts of self-creation, because they present the
writer and the reader with a new mode of being in time (Eakin, 1985; Gusdorf,
1956/1980). In the past three decades or so, work in autobiography has stressed
appreciating the genre in light of the auto*the self*rather than in light of biography
(Olney, 1980; Smith & Watson, 2001). The autobiography is now commonly
considered ‘‘an act of creation rather than a mere transcription of the past’’ (Luca,
2006, p. 126). Or, as Paul Eakin (1985) eloquently tells us, autobiography is ‘‘both an
art of memory and an art of the imagination’’ (p. 5). In such an understanding, the
central force driving this type of life-writing is identity. Luca (2006) points out that
the ‘‘quest for identity, offering one’s life as a model, self-understanding, and ordering
and reordering one’s life may be . . . reasons for writing an autobiography’’ (p. 129).
It is clear that Didion seeks clarity about her tragic experience, a clarity she cannot
find because there is the finality of death. However, she needs to access memory in
order to make sense of the experience, and so gain back a sense of self/selves*be
these coherent or incoherent, ordered or disordered.
Didion’s autobiographical process follows the conventions of autobiographical
theory with its emphasis on the self or auto by overlapping ‘‘with the process of
identity construction; both are processes of understanding one’s self in time’’
(Brockmeier, 2000, p. 54). In my view, this autobiographical process unfolds in
reliance on two modes of narrative telling and creating. I am drawn to the notion of
autobiographical time proposed by Jens Brockmeier, who points out that different
narrative models ‘‘encapsulate culturally normative views, patterns of experience and
evaluation . . . [and] organize the account of a life course; which is to say, their
specific function is to order complex temporal scenarios’’ (p. 61). Most models2
evoke a certain vision of the life course and of the direction it has taken in time.
In many, life is seen as a movement and a process, and we encounter the
autobiographical process as a place of development. However, two models of
autobiographical time*the static and the fragmentary*can be deemed ‘‘timeless’’
because they ignore and even deny that life has a direction or a goal. These models
lack the developmental trajectory of the conventional models and seem diminished of
both form and content.
A static model can be found in stories that revolve around one catastrophic event. As
we read or listen to these stories, we find an immovable picture of the self, determined
by an all-dominating experience or by irresolvable conflicts and contradictions. In
such stories we can discern stagnant metaphors such as ‘‘as if my watch stopped,’’
petrified,’’ or ‘‘frozen in time’’ (Brockmeier, 2000). Most contemporarily, stories
of survivors of genocides such as the holocaust or Rwanda illustrate such a mode of
autobiographical narration.
On a resonating yet different note, the other ‘‘timeless’’ model*fragmentary*is
rooted in a postmodern and postcolonial ethos whereby autobiographical accounts
are ‘‘decentered,’’ ‘‘open,’’ and ‘‘ludic’’ and there is an emphasis on the unpredictable
nature of life (Francese, 1997). Such life narratives rely upon metaphors such as play,
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385
scenes, patchwork, fragments, and so on. More importantly, fragmentary models
‘‘undermine the foundation upon which identity is posited by shifting the ground of
reference and explode the relationship of individual memory to any certain
chronology of experience’’ (Smith & Watson, 2001, p. 108). Visions of time in
stories that follow this model show a fragmentary layout. We find ‘‘alternative
versions’’ of life told simultaneously, mingling the real, possible, imaginative, and
anticipated life courses like equal story lines.
Didion’s memoir, I believe, encompasses these two models in showing alternating
versions of selves: a self in paralysis because of death, a self trying to construct ‘‘magic’’
pretending that a loved one had not died, and a self trying to stay alive in writing. The
mere creation of a magical year to prolong the pretence of un/death shows an
emergent static model of narration and experience. However, at the same time, we see
a self narrating and narrativizing a collage with oft-repeated scenes, resurrected in
different backgrounds and contexts, to understand them for herself and the reader in a
fragmented mode. In fact, the writing*linguistically, semantically, and syntactically*
embodies the static and the fragmented. As I read it, I found the fragmentation
everywhere; I picked up the pieces alongside the writer by traveling into the sentences
that are on the verge of completion, thoughts that may go in one direction but end up
elsewhere, and emotions that are on the threshold of toppling into hysteria, yet remain
on the page. For instance, in describing the moments that preceded her husband’s
death and a phone call from the hospital seeking his organs, Didion’s narrative shows
both models of autobiographical telling:
He was calling, he said then, to ask if I would donate my husband’s organs.
Many things went through my mind at this instant. The first thing that went
through my mind was ‘‘no.’’ Simultaneously I remembered Quintana mentioning at
dinner one night that she had identified herself as an organ donor when she
renewed her driver’s license. She had asked John if he had. He had said no. They
had discussed it.
I had changed the subject.
I had been unable to think of either of them dead . . .
. . . This man from the hospital was talking about taking only the cornea, the eyes.
Then why not say so? Why misrepresent this to me? Why make this call and not just
say ‘‘his eyes?’’ I took the silver clip the social worker had given me the night before
from the box in the bedroom and looked at the driver’s license. Eyes: BL, the license
read. Restrictions: Corrective Lenses.
Why make this call and not just say what you wanted?
His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.
And what I want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
386 D. Chawla
I could not that morning remember who wrote those lines. I thought it was e.e.
Cummings but I could not be sure. I did not have a volume of Cummings but
found an anthology on a poetry shelf in the bedroom, an old textbook of John’s,
published in 1949, when he would have been at Portsmouth Priory, the Benedictine
boarding school to which he was sent after his father died.
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(His father’s death: sudden, cardiac, in his early fifties, I should have taken that
warning.) (pp. 3941)
In the above collection of paragraphs, lines of verse, and sentences, we see
exemplified a postmodern ethos. The language, imagery, and tonality*indeed even
the pictorial structure of these stanzas*illustrate the static and fragmentary
configuration of autobiographical time in which every plot is situated around the
death event, yet the narrative moves back, forth, sideways, and beyond different time
modes. We are offered an altered/alternative course of coherence, that proceeds in a
non-linear and non-developmental fashion. Didion begins in the present as she
recalls the telephone call asking her permission to donate organs; from here she
moves to a dinner conversation from the past, to her husband’s eyes, to e. e.
Cummings, and then to her husband’s father’s death at an early age due to cardiac
arrest. Even though she skips disparate contexts and times, each memory is re/
collected around the death, and each memory harnesses a different sense of her own
identity. Finally, every recollection is necessary, even crucial, to Didion’s emergent
identity because she needs to remember the past and create some un/connecting dots
so she can forget the present*her own self-healing ritual.
In these memories, we witness the collapse of various identity/ies and very little
resurrection of previous identities. As Didion herself indicates in the paragraph I
quoted at the beginning of this essay, although resurrection is not a goal, she
resurrects because she writes. Ultimately, near the end of the memoir, Didion unveils
that she fears completion of the writing process because the writing has allowed her
to stay ‘‘alive.’’ It is a narrative refuge of self which she is loath to end. To finish ends
also her husband’s psychic aliveness. This tentativeness helps bring further understanding to the static mode of autobiographical time which compels a writer to
contain her self into one time zone. Of course, Didion overtly tells us that the act of
writing this mélange has been therapeutic and healing; more importantly, she clarifies
how her story is an act of both remembering (the past) and forgetting (the present).
She reflects on this in the last few pages of the memoir when she writes:
I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account.
Nor did I want to finish the year.
The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place.
I look for resolution and find none . . .
. . . I know why we keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep
them with us.
I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point when we must
relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. (pp. 224225)
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As we reach the conclusion, there is no end, but a symbolic death in the relinquishing
of the ‘‘magical.’’ We view the unmasking of the pretence that her husband was alive
so she could stay in the ‘‘here and now.’’ We realize that we too have been in death in
the memoir, yet we’ve pretended along with the author to reside in the magical
psychic space. This echoes the classic novelistic idea of ‘‘suspension of disbelief ’’ and
risk taken both by the writer of the autobiography and by the reader who colludes in
the risk by constructing alongside the author. This shared, even inter/subjective, risktaking brings forth the complementary identity relationships shared among readers
and writers of memoir as a genre.
The Autobiographical Pact
In this book the risk is intertwined with the two temporal modes of narrative telling.
By accessing two timeless narrative models which are neither developmental nor
linear, Didion’s text successfully establishes what has been described by Philippe
Lejeune (1989) as ‘‘the autobiographical pact,’’ a subject that is much discussed in
postmodern and postcolonial autobiographies (see also Eco, 1979; Gunn, 1982;
Miller, 1991, 1994; Smith, 2001). This pact ‘‘integrates a concept of both implied and
actual (flesh-and-blood) readers in the meaning-making of autobiographical writing’’
(Smith & Watson, 2001, p. 140; see also Lejeune, 1989). The pact embraces two
questions of identity that entwine the writer and the reader and tells us that the ‘‘Who
is speaking?’’ cannot be engaged without ‘‘Who is addressed?’’
This pact is first and foremost a pact between the author, the narrator, and the
character in the story*all of whom also share a proper name. Second, it is a pact
between the autobiographer and the reader because the reader can adopt modes of
reading or follow a story different from those suggested. Specifically, reliance on a
fragmentary model allows the reader recourse into multiple reading options because
the non-linear narration allows her to enter the text on her own conditions. The
reader then can follow the story by retaining certain fragments*previously
experienced words or events*and anticipate the coming words or events. Following
a story requires her to integrate each ‘‘catastrophic event’’ into a fluid process of
constructing, and deconstructing, ‘‘a character or a culture’’(Langsdorf, 2006, p. 3).
Theoretically, in such a scenario, there arise two moments of autobiographical
reading. There is the reading by the memoirist who, in writing, is reading her own
life. This reading is made more complex because the autobiographer can be selfreflexive about the writing even as s/he writes/performs the autobiographical act. And
then there is the reading by the reader of the text, who in encountering the lifewriting is re-reading her own life by association. The reader, according to Roland
Barthes (1985), rewrites the text of the work within the text of his/her life. Thus, the
reader, like the narrator, becomes a collaborator in the autobiographical act.
These different layers of reading bring forth ambiguity, a characteristic that enables
a collaboration in which in this memoir readers grieve alongside Didion.3 The
reading self is the self who reads, who comes to and engages with the text, and so joins
Didion’s work of repetitive reconstruction by repeating and reconstructing events in
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388 D. Chawla
the life of the self who reads. Also, as Langsdorf (2006) points out, the reading self is
the self that’s read in the resulting doubled text, a self that’s created in and through the
‘‘meaning [that] itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and
paragraphs’’ (Didion, p. 7)*a meaning that’s both cultural and personal and public
and private, and so can be shared by innumerable reading selves’’ (p. 2). This very
ambiguity enables us to notice that ‘‘the self who reads gains, from the self that’s read,
a multiplicity of possibilities for being self, for building identities through
appropriating variations proposed by another’’ (p. 3). This is an ontological turn
that asks not what the self is, but how it becomes*indeed is always becoming*self
(Langsdorf, 2006).
In exploring different ways that life-writing might be interpreted, Smith and
Watson (2001) outline some stances a reader might embrace when encountering a
memoir. I focus on their discussion of the audience and addressee as it relates to the
autobiographical pact. The private/public nature of this memoir alongside its
fragmentary and static layout indeed enables the reader to enter the reading on
her own terms, yet at the same time some questions remain. Who is the implied
reader of this text? Who is this book written for, and what is the audience? However, I
prefer to complicate this somewhat by asking instead*what kind of a reading self
does the text implore, indeed, necessitate one to become? On an overt and indeed
basic level, a reader undergoing a similar catastrophic event would benefit from
reading this memoir. This memoir can be easily categorized as a trauma and
scriptotherapeutic narrative, as it certainly offers one way that a reading self might
associate with grief (Watson & Smith, 2001). For other readers, not personally
involved in trauma and death, what can such a book offer? What selves does it
uncover, create, or demolish, and why? What kind of a reader might I become as I
read this memoir? Moreover, what modes of reading am I called to utilize? Several
critics have engaged such questions and often discussed them in terms of binaries*
the resistant versus the compliant reader or the reliable versus the unreliable narrator
(Booth, 1961/1983; Schechet, 2005). The resistant reader is cued by the text to resist
the text’s narrator. The compliant reader, on the other hand, is a reader cued to follow
the text’s narrator without questioning their reliability.
Instead of engaging these binaries, I take the middle ground as I enter the
discussion of who is being addressed by reflexively turning to my own entry into the
autobiographical pact. I encountered The Year of Magical Thinking in all the public
ways that I was allowed to via the ‘‘narrative unconscious’’*the culturally rooted
aspects of my history that had not revealed themselves as a part of my own story
(Freeman, 2002). I was a public reader. The fragmentary model propelled me into
embracing a configurational reading stance described by Mink (1970) in his essay
‘‘History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension’’ as a mode of comprehension that
allows a reader to read stories as elements in a single and concrete set of relationships.
For instance, when Didion tells us about the hospital call for donating organs, which
leads her to other memories unraveled by that one phone call, we see the writer’s
thought process skip multiple temporal zones that are eventually all connected to the
death event. To comprehend this process, I relied on configured reading (as much as
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389
Didion relies on configured comprehension) because we both needed to makes sense
of what seemed to be incoherent and fragmented, yet held together through various
events, plots, literary details, and anecdotes. Since such temporal swings occur
throughout the book, as a reader I had to become adept in the configured mode,
otherwise the story/ies would have escaped comprehension.
Thus, my first entry into the pact was to align with the writer in a configurational
mode, and my first self-transformation was to become curious about how I might
cope with such a loss. I asked myself, naively, how a human being was able to
reconcile let alone write about such a loss. As I reflected upon this, indeed rummaged
through my reading experience, I realized that what I had felt most dominantly was a
feeling of incompleteness which, I believe, is the ethos Didion wants to accomplish.
This is a memoir replete with strong literary allusions*both medieval and
contemporary*and so, in a literal sense, there is an awareness that a reader might
be deciphering a puzzle because s/he is not so familiar with all the literary works
under discussion. However, not knowing some of them ceases to matter because their
deliberate inclusion seems to contribute to the fragmentary layout of the narration. It
centers the writer*Didion*into her medium, and if the reader feels outside some of
the literary allusions, their briefness keeps her engrossed (as an example see the
discussion of D.H. Lawrence and e.e. Cummings mentioned previously).
Emotionally, I was not replenished by the memoir; I was disturbed because I was
impelled to think about death in ways that I had not previously imagined. For
instance, Didion’s repetitive reconstruction of the moments of her husband’s death
made me conscious of the ‘‘whys’’ of specific details because knowing how everything
may have occurred in John’s last moments were necessary facts that she needed to
recreate, so she could forget. As I watched Didion retrieving literary sources to
understand her grief, I wondered, for instance, what I would read in moments such as
these, or if I would even be able to read. Would I read about Emily Post? Would I read
D.H. Lawrence? Would I be able to eat? Would I be able to write? When Didion refers
to her body feeling delicate, her own feeling of physical vulnerability in the months
following the death, I am reminded of how one feels for days after one is recovering
from a simple virus*fear of its return. And then, I begin to wonder*how would my
body feel in these moments when a return is only imaginable?
More importantly, my reading of this work took me into my own recollections
about how I had previously grieved for people, places, and relationships that I left
behind. A period of mourning that I can recall with sensory, intellectual, and
emotional detail is the grief I felt in the weeks before I left my erstwhile home in
Delhi, India, and arrived here in the United States 10 years ago as a 23-year-old
student. As the day to leave drew closer, I found myself unable to eat, think, or even
pack my belongings into the two suitcases permitted for the trip. I experienced a
sense of paralysis, muteness, and extreme anxiety, as if I was in mourning even before
I had left home, even before I had said goodbye*a kind of death, a void, but not
death itself.
How did I cope? I didn’t. I do remember entering into a literary heaven, accessing
Indian writers writing in English, accessing immigrant/exile writing by authors such
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390 D. Chawla
as Rushdie, Naipaul, Kundera, Neruda, and so on. Unconsciously, in reading them, I
hoped to learn how to become a refugee. In those times, I began writing memories
which had perhaps been in my unconscious, but the event of leaving home had
brought them to the surface. I wrote about my mother and focused more on how I
remembered her and wanted to remember her than on what I felt about the loss. In
my summers here in the United States, I remember recreating in essays and poems
memories of the summers of my childhood in which my mother is ever-present. I
needed to remember the scenes and the sceneries and I needed to maintain and
re-imagine my past in order to exist in this new present. Alternatively, I wanted to reimagine old sceneries to map them on the new topography that I was making mine.
As I recollect this grief, I am called to another one, to a time when I was seven years
old and was bidding farewell to my 10-year-old brother whom I was losing to the
strangeness of a boarding school in the north Indian hills. I have never told him that I
missed him then, and nor has he told me that he missed me, but I grieved as only a
sibling can and then I wrote. Instead of writing about how much I missed him, I
wrote to imagine him in new locations, collapsing time, space, and identities into
varied and multiple amalgamations. In a small essay, ‘‘In the Shadows of Baba,’’
I imagined him in his boarding school as he went through his daily routines. In text, I
became his psychic shadow to understand his life away from me. Retrospectively,
I too was creating a magical space*a different one, but a grieving space.
My goal here is not to compare grief; instead, I am suggesting that as I read Didion
and unraveled the mazes of memory in her memoir, I became a collaborator/reader in
her grief. I was able to fall into rhythm with the import of the sideway stories, the
exploration of unrelated events, and the relative non-structure of the entwined
stories. I was able to understand the story of her marriage as a necessary co-narrative
to the story of death. In fact, it was important for Didion to tell the story of her
40-year-old marriage because she needed to create a backdrop for the story that she
formulated in writing. This backdrop is crucial for the reader; without the backdrop,
her grief remains cursory. With it, we are provided with much more than a portrait of
grief; we are provided with the anatomy of grief. The creation of this backdrop brings
to my mind a very recent essay in Text and Performance Quarterly by GingrichPhilbrook (2005), in which he explores two different ways whereby one might
write about the experience of a sudden death in a family (in his case that of a
grandmother).
If a writer chooses to write about the experience, s/he could describe the entire
process of receiving the death-call, sliding down the kitchen floor, the emotions one
felt, and so on. Such writing, according to Gingrich-Philbrook (2005), would not give
us courage to face the years ahead without a loved one. In other words, such a
narrative mode could potentially exoticize, trivialize, and even make clinical (owing
to the linear detail) the immediate experience of death and its ensuing grief. If one is
compelled to write about these matters, then a better alternative could be to
reflect on one afternoon, one summer, in her dining room, years before. One day I
remembered listening to her talk, that lost hour, about her grandmother. I watched
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her eyes shimmer, taking in the mirage of her decades-old memory of the woman
who raised her; I watched her rock, ever so slightly, in front of a painting she
bought at K-Mart because the kerchiefed woman reminded her of her grandmother
saying grace over a bowl of soup. (p. 305)
The point is that writing of ‘‘that other memory, of her memory, might provide a
source of courage’’ (Gingrich-Philbrook, 2005, p. 305) for the writer who grieves and
moreover for the reader who audiences this grief.
I believe that Didion creates many such backdrops for herself and unconsciously for
the reader, and in so doing creates her addressee by inviting a non-grieving audience
into the autobiographical pact. Toward the end of the book, Didion in fact communes
with her audience when her writing directly/semantically ensconces the reader within
it. It seems as if the fragmentary model, which encloses the public and the private, and
the resultant narration, which is both personal and immensely cultural, together
prepare the reader/us for this moment when the writer-reader officially become
collaborators. This communion is most evident in the following lines:
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we
know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days
or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the
nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel
shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and
mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We
do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is
about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will
be ‘‘healing.’’ A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the
earliest. We imagine the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral after
which the hypothetical healing will take place . . .. We have no way of knowing that
this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be
anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of
others . . .. Nor can we know of the fact of the unending absence that follows, the
void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during
which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself. (pp. 188189)
As it nears completion with such stanzas, The Year of Magical Thinking achieves
hermeneutic intimacy because it weaves together the narrator, the narrated, the
individual life, the culture outside, and the reader who is graciously ushered inside
the narrative. Whether it provides therapy to readers or an exotic journey into a yetunknown world of grief, or creates an empathetic audience, it certainly provides the
reader with the option of becoming a collaborator.
This option for the reader to become a collaborator is also an invitation to them
intersubjectively to enter the ‘‘experience’’ of the writer and thus fashion a readeridentity that may be similar to or disparate from the author’s identity. The lesson to
be learned from such a reading of any memoir is to understand that in all life-writing
even though the experience we are required to enter is simply personal, it is anything
but merely personal (Smith & Watson, 2001). Entering the experience of the writer in
life-writing is necessarily an intersubjective process, because experience itself is ‘‘a
process by which subjectivity is constructed’’ (see Scott, 1992, p. 27). Experience is
392 D. Chawla
mediated through memory, the body, and language. It is already an interpretation of
the past and our place in the ‘‘culturally and historically specific present’’ (Smith &
Watson, 2001, p. 24). Both the reader and the writer enter it subjectively. Explaining
this matter, Teresa de Lauretis notes that this entry is the intersubjective process
through which
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one places oneself or one is placed in a social reality and so perceives and
comprehends as subjective (referring to, originating in oneself) those relations*
material, economic, and interpersonal*which are in fact social, and, in a larger
perspective, historical. (1984, p. 159)
Life-writing, most importantly, shows this process at work and illustrates quite clearly
that it is not individuals who have experiences, but ‘‘subjects who are constructed
through experience’’ (Scott, 1992, p. 27).
Ultimately, and broadly, as a reader what can this memoir teach us? About life? Or
about grief? Or what does it prepare us for? I am reminded here of a few lines of a
review of this memoir in the New York Review of Books, where John Leonard (2005)
notes that he cannot imagine dying without having read this book. Having read and
re-read the memoir, I wholeheartedly agree. Does this book teach us how we may
grieve some day? It might. However, I don’t see that as its intent. Even so, it certainly
is a story about the grieving. Rather, it makes me wonder: how I will encounter grief
in the future? What will be my own anatomy? Will I be stronger or weaker in my
dealings with grief? These are questions that will arrange themselves and that I will
unravel when grief finds me. For, as Louise Erdrich (2001) tells us, there is no place as
unknown as grief; in making us encounter her own anatomy of grief, Didion makes
grief more familiar and ironically even more unknown*an inherently subjective
cultural process. And that, I believe, might be most powerful lesson we can take from
The Year of Magical Thinking.
Notes
[1]
[2]
[3]
Even though there are theoretical and conceptual differences among all these terms, in this
essay, for practical reasons I use the words autobiography, memoir, life narrative, and lifewriting interchangeably.
The other models of autobiographical time proposed by Brockmeier (2000) are the linear,
the circular, the cyclical, and the spiral.
In her work, Narrative Fissures: Reading and Rhetoric, Nita Schechet (2005) refers to
strategies of narration that allow readers into texts as a narrative fissure, which are sites for
textual entry for readers of fiction or ethnography. Narrative fissures might be writerinitiated or reader-sought. Iser (1989) discusses these as ‘‘blanks’’*switches that activate
readers to initiate their own ideas into completing the intention of the text. While some of
these ideas resonate with my argument, I am limiting my analysis to autobiography, a matter
that these critics do not directly address.
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