The Year of Magical Thinking Adaptation Audible Original by Joan Didion
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “If I’m sane, what happened to me could happen to you.” The Year of Magical Thinking (2007) is the one-woman play that Joan Didion adapted from her longer book (2005). Vanessa Redgrave uncannily reads the distilled, potent essence of the full work in a one-woman performance. The play begins with the sudden death of Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne, when he suffered a sudden attack at home, leading to the arrival of paramedics who worked on him there and then took him to a hospital where he died. In addition to that tragedy, the couple's daughter Quintana, five months married, has been in the hospital in a coma after a septic infection. Her daughter’s serious health struggles (after the infection is apparently cured, a mysterious brain ailment strikes her down) interweave a counterpoint to Didion’s year of coming to accept the loss of her husband. She tells us that losing her husband led her into a year of magical thinking, during which, despite of course being aware that her husband had died (to the point of ordering an autopsy and a cremation and starting to organize a funeral), she was also partly convinced that he was still alive and would return to her. She did not let on to any family members or friends as to her magical thinking but continued showing everyone who came in contact with her that she was in control of the situation. But she refused to get rid of his shoes, thinking that he would need them when he returned. One of the compelling parts of her approach to this topic is her repeated or frequent addresses to the reader or listener as “you,” telling us that if we haven't already been in the same place she was, we will be sooner or later. “If I'm sane, what happened to me could happen to you.” She reveals with her scalpel-like honesty that she and her husband did not have an easy relationship. Although she says that they always trusted each other and relied on each other and worked for the same essential goals and talked about everything together--even when she felt that her husband was wrong--he tended to resent her always being right. “Must you always be right? Must you always have the last word? Can’t you ever let it go?” appear refrain-like throughout the play. She reveals her guilt and regret over not having taken her husband more seriously when he told her things like “I have two more days to live,” because in the event he only had thirty-two more days to live after he said that, while she thought he was just being dramatic. Didion also reveals with details here and there that she and her husband were well to do, taking expensive vacations and being friends with Hollywood types like Katherine Ross. This demonstrates that tragedy strikes even affluent people, but one also wonders how much more difficult it is for poor people to deal with such tragedies. The heart of this memoir is that we can't keep anyone we loved safe (“Did I lie to you all your life? If I believe what I told you was it lying?”), that we do not expect the shock of a sudden illness or death of a loved one to be obliterative, that the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is is very great, and that, after all, the only meaning or comfort in life lies in geology, the erosion of and thrusting up of mountains over long spans of time. The wisdom Didion gained as a result of losing her husband to a sudden death and dealing with her daughter being in a ICU ward of a hospital and the honesty with which she relates her experience make for a compelling play. It is witty and devastating, especially with Vanessa Redgrave’s perfect and poignant reading of it, her aged voice quivering but ever in command, vulnerable but philosophical, scalding and frank. Anyone who has lost a loved one suddenly or over time or anyone who might lose someone so should be moved by this audiobook. View all my reviews
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