Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking and what happens when the writer turns the camera on herself
We've been here before. In fact, Joan Didion is where much of this journey began.
In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she gave us the sentence that has followed us through almost every writer we've encountered since: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”
At first, it seemed like a warning about what writers do to other people. Rachel Cusk showed us what happens when the people around a writer begin to recognise themselves in the work. Truman Capote took the murder of the Clutter family and transformed it into In Cold Blood, turning Perry Smith into one of the most compelling characters in American nonfiction. Norman Mailer tried to get himself out of the way. Hunter S. Thompson gave up on that idea altogether. Janet Malcolm asked what a writer owes the person who trusts them enough to become material. Emmanuel Carrère went further still and admitted that sometimes a writer can spend years studying another person and still fail to understand them.
Carrère left us with a surprisingly simple possibility: perhaps the honest writer sometimes has to say I don't know. It felt like the end of something, or at least the end of one part of this journey. But it also takes us straight back to Didion, because we've spent all this time asking whether a writer can really know another person. What happens when the person she's trying to understand is herself?
The writer turns the camera around
There is an assumption we tend to make about memoir. A writer may misunderstand another person. They may misinterpret an interview, select the wrong details, mistake performance for sincerity or impose a narrative on a life that doesn't quite fit. But surely there is one subject over whom a writer has some authority: herself.
Who knows Joan Didion better than Joan Didion?
The Year of Magical Thinking makes that question considerably more complicated. On 30 December 2003, Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, returned home after visiting their daughter Quintana, who was critically ill in hospital. They sat down to dinner and Dunne suffered a massive heart attack. He died that night.
Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking the following autumn, and the book was published in 2005. You could describe it as a memoir of grief, but that description makes it sound far more settled than the book actually is. Didion isn't simply remembering what happened. She is watching herself try to understand what happened, and those are very different things.
That distinction is what makes the book such an interesting next step for us. Until now, the difficulty has largely been the distance between the writer and another person. Didion collapses that distance completely and discovers that the problem remains.
Grief has its own logic
The title tells us something important about the book. Magical thinking describes the strange belief, often existing beneath rational thought, that our thoughts or actions might somehow influence reality. Didion knows John is dead. She dealt with the hospital, made the necessary arrangements and understands death perfectly well as a fact. Yet another part of her mind refuses the information.
One of the book's most famous moments concerns John's shoes. Didion finds herself unable to give them away because, somewhere inside the logic of grief, he might need them when he comes back. What makes the moment so extraordinary is that Didion understands perfectly well how irrational this is. We are watching an exceptionally analytical mind discover that knowledge and belief are not the same thing.
She knows John is dead while behaving, at some level, as though he might return. She understands what has happened while simultaneously refusing to understand it. Rather than smoothing away that contradiction when she comes to write the book, she makes it part of the book's structure.
And suddenly Emmanuel Carrère doesn't seem quite so far away.
What if the unreliable narrator is you?
We've spent a lot of time in this series worrying about unreliable writers. Hunter S. Thompson practically turns unreliability into a literary method. Capote's authority becomes troubling when we start looking at how much narrative construction sits behind the apparently omniscient voice of In Cold Blood. Jean-Claude Romand presents Carrère with an even stranger problem because the man explaining Romand's life is the same man who spent eighteen years inventing it.
The Year of Magical Thinking introduces another kind of unreliability. Didion is trying to tell the truth, but the mind doing the telling has itself been altered by what happened.
Grief distorts time. Memory loops back on itself. Certain moments become overwhelmingly significant while others disappear. The mind returns obsessively to the same details, convinced that if it examines them once more it might discover something it missed. Didion rereads medical literature, reconstructs events, examines the circumstances of John's death and revisits conversations. She follows memories down corridors, doubles back and examines them again.
It resembles reporting, which is hardly surprising. Didion has spent a lifetime looking closely at things and trying to work out what they mean. But this time the reporter and the witness are the same person, and the witness is grieving.
That creates a different version of the problem we've been following. Carrère cannot be certain that Romand's account of himself is reliable. Didion cannot be certain that her own mind is behaving like a neutral archive. Access is no longer the issue. You could hardly have greater access to a subject than being the subject yourself.
Didion has always been in the frame
Perhaps none of this should surprise us. One of the reasons Didion has remained such an important presence throughout this series is that her writing has always understood that observation is shaped by the observer.
Long before The Year of Magical Thinking, her essays recognised that the person looking at the world affects what appears on the page. The California of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is not simply California. It is California as filtered through Joan Didion: the things she notices, the people she talks to, the details she selects and the connections she makes between them.
Her coolness can make the prose feel almost clinical. Didion watches, notices and records the apparently insignificant detail that suddenly makes an entire scene reveal itself. That apparent coolness can disguise how much power the writer is exercising. The detail that seems inevitable only becomes inevitable because Didion chose it. The camera was always there.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, she points that camera at herself and discovers that the person behind it isn't necessarily any more stable or easily understood than the people who once stood in front of it.
So who gets sold out?
Which brings us back to that sentence: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”
When we first encountered it, the ethical problem seemed relatively straightforward. The writer observes another person, selects what is interesting or revealing about them and eventually turns them into material. The person who was once sitting across a table becomes a character in an essay or book.
Memoir appears to change that transaction because the writer and the material are supposedly the same person. But The Year of Magical Thinking makes me wonder whether that is really true. The Joan Didion who experienced John's death and the Joan Didion who later wrote about that experience are not quite identical.
Time has passed. The writer can look at the grieving woman she was and see things that woman could not see. She can expose her irrationality, her repetitions, her private bargains with reality and her refusal to surrender John's shoes. She can turn her most vulnerable self into a character and examine that character with the same exacting attention she once directed towards everyone else.
The writer is still selling somebody out. It just happens to be an earlier version of herself.
That might sound like a clever way of turning Didion's old line back on her, but I think there is something more interesting going on. Writing about yourself always involves creating some distance between the person who experienced something and the person who is now arranging that experience on the page. The writer gets the final word. The earlier self cannot object to the interpretation.
Except it is never only yourself
There is another complication, because there is almost no such thing as writing only about yourself.
To write honestly about a marriage is to write about another person. To write about motherhood is to write about a child. To write about childhood is to write about parents, siblings, teachers and friends. Our lives overlap too completely for autobiography to remain contained within the boundaries of the person whose name appears on the cover.
The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's account of grief, but John Gregory Dunne is everywhere in it. So is Quintana. Didion is writing herself, yet she cannot write herself without also writing the people whose lives made hers what it was.
And here the series folds back on itself again. Rachel Cusk is waiting for us. So is Knausgård. So is Janet Malcolm. The writer-subject relationship hasn't disappeared simply because we've moved into memoir. It has moved inside the family, where questions of ownership may become even more difficult because everybody involved has some claim on the same memories.
Perhaps you can consent to becoming material. You cannot necessarily consent on behalf of everyone who appears in your memories.
Memory isn't an archive
There is another assumption sitting beneath memoir that becomes increasingly difficult the longer you think about it: the idea that memory is a form of storage.
Something happens. The brain records it. Years later, the memoirist retrieves the file and writes it down. Except anyone who has ever argued with a sibling about childhood knows how quickly that model falls apart. Two people can remember the same room differently, the same conversation, the same parent, the same afternoon. Neither necessarily has to be lying.
This creates a peculiar problem for memoir because literature rewards exactly the things memory is bad at providing: shape, meaning, causation, beginnings and endings. The writer knows where the story is going. The person who lived it didn't.
That knowledge changes everything. When Didion reconstructs the period surrounding John's death, she already knows which ordinary moments are about to become the last ordinary moments. A final dinner becomes the final dinner because of what happened afterwards. A conversation acquires a significance it could not have possessed when it was taking place. Life does not label these things while we're living them. Writing does.
That doesn't mean the memoirist is being dishonest. It means the act of writing inevitably changes the experience by giving it form. The life happened one way. The story must be constructed another.
The danger of a beautiful sentence
Didion introduces another problem because she can write very beautiful sentences, and beautiful writing has a peculiar authority.
We encountered this with Capote. Part of the power of In Cold Blood is not simply that Capote tells us what happened, but that he makes what happened feel narratively complete. Carrère becomes interesting partly because he resists that completeness and leaves uncertainty visible on the page.
Didion does something stranger in The Year of Magical Thinking. She uses extraordinarily controlled prose to describe the collapse of control. Her sentences are precise even when the mind she is describing is not. The writing is composed while the experience itself was anything but.
That tension may be one reason the book is so powerful. Didion does not imitate chaos in order to describe chaos. She gives it structure. She takes repetition, fear, disbelief, memory and grief and turns them into something we can follow.
But this brings us straight back to the central problem of writing. The experience was messy. The finished book isn't. Something happened between those two states, and that something is the writer.
Perhaps that is what writers always do. They don't simply reproduce experience. They impose enough shape on it that somebody else can enter it.
Can you trust yourself with your own story?
Perhaps we've been asking the wrong version of the question.
“Can you trust a writer?” assumes that somewhere there is an undistorted truth that the writer either gives us or withholds. But Carrère complicated that. Sometimes the writer genuinely doesn't know. Didion complicates it further because sometimes the writer may not fully understand what she herself knows.
That doesn't make memoir false. If anything, it makes memoir much more interesting than straightforward testimony. The memoirist isn't simply retrieving the past and placing it on the page. She is creating a new relationship with it through selection, arrangement, reconsideration and discovery.
And inevitably she changes it by turning it into a story.
This is where The Year of Magical Thinking begins to feel less like a detour from the writers we've been discussing and more like the next logical step. We've spent all this time worrying about whether writers can accurately represent other people. Memoir asks us to consider the uncomfortable possibility that representing yourself may not be any simpler.
The person who lived it and the person who writes it
There is a gap at the centre of every memoir. On one side is the person who lived the experience. On the other is the person who writes about it. We casually refer to them as the same person, but writing makes the distinction harder to ignore.
The writer knows what happened next. The person in the memory doesn't. The writer knows which relationships survived, which marriages ended, who died, which apparently insignificant afternoon became important, which promise wasn't kept and which goodbye turned out to be the last one.
That knowledge gives the writer enormous power over her former self. She can make that earlier person appear naive without her knowing she is naive, tragic without her knowing she is tragic, or wrong without her knowing she is wrong. She can reveal things the earlier self desperately wanted to hide. She can decide which version of that person survives on the page.
Which sounds remarkably like what writers do to other people.
Maybe Didion's warning was bigger than it first appeared. Writers are always selling somebody out. Sometimes the person being sold out is sitting across the table. Sometimes they're answering the writer's questions. Sometimes they're dead. And sometimes they're the person the writer used to be.
Which brings us somewhere new
The Year of Magical Thinking brings this journey full circle, but it doesn't bring it to an end. Instead, it turns the question around.
We began with Didion and asked whether we could trust writers with other people's lives. Capote showed us what happens when a writer makes another person comprehensible. Mailer tried to reduce the writer's interference. Thompson made interference part of the method. Malcolm exposed the relationship behind the work. Carrère admitted that even intimacy and access may not produce understanding.
Now Didion turns the problem inward. Perhaps knowing yourself isn't any simpler than knowing anybody else.
And that leaves us with a new set of questions. If memory isn't an archive, what exactly is a memoirist giving us? If two people remember the same childhood differently, who owns the story? If writing honestly about yourself means exposing your parents, children, lovers and friends, where does your story end and theirs begin? And if the person you were no longer exists to argue with the person you've become, who gets the final word?
That feels like the beginning of our next journey.
Because Joan Didion's warning still stands: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”
We just hadn't realised that sometimes the first person on the list is the writer herself.
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