The Year of Magical Thinking

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-13

Chapters 14-17

Chapters 18-22

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Symbols & Motifs

Clothing

Throughout the memoir, Didion’s memories are marked by clothing—her own and others’. Didion returns to her home the night of her husband’s death to find his scarf and windbreaker where he had left it after their walk. His clothing becomes an important symbol in the book. The hospital hands her his possessions, including the clothing he was wearing at the time of his death, and she carefully folds and puts these items away. Her friends tell her that she needs to deal with his clothing, arguing that this is an important part of the grieving process. At first, she tackles his walking clothes with vigor, but as she reaches the point of needing to address his suits and shoes, she halts—she believes that getting rid of this clothing is a failure to acknowledge the possibility of his return.

In the memoir, clothing symbolizes both memory and the physicality of being. For Didion, the clothing of her husband is her husband. Tossing it away is accepting that his physical body can no longer be present. When Didion thinks about her own wedding dress and the wedding dress of her daughter Quintana, these dresses represent her memory and experience. They embody who she was, who her daughter was, and a time that Didion cannot return to. The centrality of clothing also appears when Didion recalls other memories—the smell of a jersey dress after being caught in the rain in Paris, or the metro ticket she found in her husband’s jacket.

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Clothing also symbolizes emotion. Didion dreams of a braided belt like another belt Dunne had. In her dream, she knows that this is his favorite belt. The accessory breaks in half in her hands, and she tries desperately to mend it. The dream represents her guilt over her husband’s death, the irrational idea that she could have stopped it. When Didion finds a passage that Dunne had written about the couple’s wedding day, she finds a description of the sunglasses she wore. Dunne’s passage is marked by both casual coolness and great emotion, mirroring Didion’s approach to her husband’s death and her attachment to the physicality of his possessions.

The Suppression of Emotion

The suppression of emotion is an important motif in The Year of Magical Thinking. The social worker assigned to inform Didion of her husband’s passing calls her a “cool customer” (15). Didion moves robotically through the motions required after his death: She signs the paperwork, makes the necessary phone calls to family members and friends, and organizes his possessions. She finds the hospital workers relieved at her lack of emotive display. She believes that it is important for her husband to see that she is “handling things,” and she takes care to mentally prepare herself for the identification of her husband’s body at the mortuary so as not to display signs of extreme grief (19). To her friends, Didion appears to be coping, but her interior experiences are starkly different.

Didion suggests that it is only after her husband’s death that she understands “suttee,” or “sati,” a historical practice of Hindu widows who sacrificed themselves by throwing their bodies onto the funeral pyre. Didion says that this was not because of their grief but because the pyre was familiar to them: it was the physical representation of the space they occupied as a result of their grief. After Quintana begins to recover, Didion can finally start mourning. Everything had been on hold because she was so focused on her daughter’s condition, but as Quintana improves, Didion’s emotions begin to bubble up to the surface more openly.

The Ordinary to Extraordinary

From the beginning of the book, Didion is fixated on the idea that ordinary moments can change into the extraordinary in an instant, like the flip of a switch. This becomes an important motif in the memoir as Didion constructs and reconstructs the timeline of her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness. Didion and Dunne were sitting at the kitchen table; everything was normal. Then suddenly, it was not. When Didion made a list of questions to ask the doctors about Quintana’s condition, Dunne added a question that Didion suggests is another form of the same idea: How can things be normal and then suddenly not normal?

Later, after Dunne’s death and Quintana’s second period in the hospital, Didion recalls listening to the friends and family members of another patient gather and discuss how odd it was, how everything was ordinary and then not. In Chapter 11, Didion sitting in the car with Dunne when a man at the traffic light slumps over his steering wheel. As a police officer and pedestrians rush to help, Dunne and Didion realize that they know the man is dead before his family does, and this thought reminds Didion once more of how quickly the ordinary can turn into the extraordinary.