Joan Didion, one of the founders (together with Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer) of "new journalism", novelist, screenwriter, publicist and in general an icon of American culture of the 60s - 70s, is paradoxically known in our country in only one of its incarnations - grieving. Seven years ago, Didion's big essay "Blue Nights" was published in Russian, which tells the story of the death of Quintana, the 39-year-old daughter of the writer. Written seven years earlier and finally published in Russian, "The Year of Magical Thinking" is also a "mourning" essay dedicated to the death of her husband and longtime collaborator Didion, writer John Dunn, who died of a massive heart attack while their daughter was unconscious in intensive care ...
"A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty." ― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“Life is changing rapidly. Life changes in a second. You sit down to dinner and the life you know ends ”- this phrase, recorded by Joan Didion in his diary five months after her husband's death, opens the book and becomes a kind of key to it. Joan and John came from the hospital where they were visiting their daughter. Here they are discussing the World War I monograph that John finished reading the day before. Here Joan sets the table for dinner and makes a fire in the fireplace. For a second - and now John is lying on the floor, paramedics are bending over him. Another frame change - Joan is returning from the hospital alone, and now someone (is she herself?) Has to throw away unnecessary syringes and ECG electrodes, and also wash out the blood.
How can something that took miserable seconds turn out to be so irreversible, capable of erasing forty years of love, happiness, and trust? Why a random event that literally broke out like a bolt from the blue can't be turned back? Maybe John died not in New York, but on the West Coast, where time is several hours behind, he is still alive, and if you keep his death a secret, then nothing will happen? And if it is correct, to the end, to perform all the funeral rituals - then John will be there again? If you donate all of his shoes to charity, what will he wear when he returns? From all these questions - so irrational and at the same time so understandable - a very complex system of supports (false and true), fears, hopes, small rituals and growing madness, in which the author drowns over the next year and which at the same time attentively and vigilantly records.
Despite the fact that Didion's book is entirely based on her own experience and pain, The Year of Magical Thinking is not a cry (although it is literally woven of sorrow), not the cry of a widowed woman whose child is also teetering on the brink of life and death, and certainly not a therapeutic letter. Plunging into the blackest, impenetrable darkness (a few months after her father's death, Quintana recovered, got sick again, recovered again, but two weeks after the release of The Year of Magical Thinking she died from a new complication), Didion tries to understand its structure. The woman, who has interviewed witnesses of the attack on Pearl Harbor and relatives of people who died in the catastrophic fire in the Coconut Grove nightclub for her books and films, remains true to herself: she becomes an observer, witness and chronicler of grief - this time not someone else's, but his own.
The loss of a loved one is experienced as physical, acute suffering, rolling in attacks and accompanied by suffocation, pain, cramps in the throat. Crossword puzzles provide a brief reassurance and bring into life an element of control that is irrevocably lost in other areas. Poetry (if you pick the right lines by W.H. Auden or E.E. Cummings) can last a few days. The modern world has lost the skill of experiencing grief - today "mourning" is perceived as something indecent, infringing on the right of others to live and enjoy life. Liquid food is better for the bereaved than solid food. The face of the "tough nut" can hide anything. In the life of a woman who has lost her husband, new fears appear - for example, breaking the neck of her thigh in the bathroom, from which there will be no one to pull you out.
Didion not only reflects on her own observations - these and others: she reads nonstop, looking for confirmation of some of her guesses and refutation of others. The most unexpected sources of information are used - from popular psychological literature to poetry and from the memoirs of people who have experienced something similar, to Stephen Hawking's interviews and instructions on how to properly organize a funeral. Remaining at the same time inside her grief and despair, Joan Didion is at the same time transported outside in order to comprehend and understand what is happening from the outside, to compare it with someone else's experience - and this ability of hers evokes respect, smoothly turning into admiration. Perhaps, besides her, only Julian Barnes did something similar in his essay "Living Standards", written shortly after the death of his wife, but even he had to make a choice in favor of the external, keeping the internal to a minimum. Didion, in some incomprehensible way, manages to be equally present in both worlds, to be both an observer and an object of observation.
Joan Didion's fame was brought primarily by her novels (the most famous is “Play whatever comes out”), political non-fiction and collections of stories - none of this, unfortunately, was translated into Russian. However, the decision to start acquainting the domestic reader with Didion through her two chamber “funeral” essays does not look as controversial as it might seem at first glance. No matter how atypical for Joan Didion “Blue Nights” and “Year of Magical Thinking” are, they still allow us to understand what their creator is - a rare writer who can simultaneously drown, drown, and masterfully record the symptoms of drowning.
This article was sponsored by John Nyemcsik
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