Chekhov’s Mistess

On the Importance of Telling Stories

My grandmother often told me the story of her father-in-law who found out just before Christmas that he was going to die. Determined to live through the holiday to be with his family, he died right after the new year.

She and my grandfather, then very young newlyweds, took that rapid loss as a lesson to live for the day and be happy with what they had – a lesson they truly followed. When she became old and my grandfather died, my grandmother thrived on telling old stories to keep herself going. It wasn’t so much that she was living in the past, but the telling of the stories made the past alive and relevant. It is that same sense of the need to live in the moment while telling stories of the past that Joan Didion has infused through her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.

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After my last post on The Year of Magical Thinking (A Good Book on Death?), my wife and I went the next day to buy the book. I am typically a capricious reader but rarely do I drop everything to read a book right away to the exclusion of all others. I can’t explain why I did this time, other than to speculate that reading about death from the standpoint of someone with literary sensibilities had some morose appeal.

The memoir recounts the year following her husband’s death from a sudden coronary event one night – “you sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends” – after having been at the hospital visiting their daughter who is in an inexplicable coma. Over the course of the next year Ms. Didion attempts to make sense of her grief, understand why she didn’t see it coming (as if anyone could), and deal with her daughter’s terrible illness. As a reader we see glimpses into a family’s life and learn about the helplessness and fragility of life despite the best medical technology available.

I expected to be sad throughout the book and somehow that didn’t happen. There was no sense of pity, only searching for details that might come together to explain what was happening, as if the surreal fragments of her current life could only be put in place with patches from the past. The stories became the glue holding her life together.

But not only has Ms. Didion had a rich life, she has had a rich literary life, meaning that not only could she draw on her own stories, she had the tradition of poems and novels to draw upon, the richest stories imaginable, handed down through time, suddenly showing their relevance in new ways.

Philippe Ariés, in The Hour of Our Death, points out that the essential characteristic of death as it appears in the Chanson de Roland is that the death, even if sudden or accidental, ‘gives advance warning of its arrival.’ Gawain is asked: ‘Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?’ Gawain answers: ‘I tell you that I shall not live two days.’ Ariés notes: ‘Neither his doctor nor his friends nor the priests…know as much about it as he. Only the dying man can tell you how much time he has left.’


You sit down to dinner.

The quest for relevance didn’t end there, but included the unlikely literature of Emily Post and dry, daunting texts like Clinical Neuroanatomy, covering all her practical bases. In fact, she resisted many of her own stories. Throughout the book, Didion writes about avoiding those sparks of memory that would take her where she didn’t want to go. She combats them with yet other stories leading into other places and she combats them with flashes of self-awareness.

Another vortex revealed itself.


The last time I covered a convention at Madison Square Garden had been 1992, the Democratic convention.


John would wait until I came uptown at eleven or so to have dinner with me…


…I had stood on this escalator thinking about those days and nights without once thinking I could change their outcome. I realized that since the last morning of 2003, the morning after he died, I had been trying to reverse time, run the film backward.


It was now eight months later, August 30th, 2004, and I still was.


The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collusion, the collapse of the dead star.

***

Anyone who has spent time in a hospital knows that they are worlds unto themselves with language, protocols and a hierarchal society all their own. The most distinct place is the land of neuro-surgery populated by people wearing scrubs and masks who have devoted themselves wholly to this world. It’s a cold and very matter-of-hard-facts world. Didion best illustrates its uniqueness with a story in Clinical Neuroanatomy, from the appendix on The Neurologic Examination where doctors are instructed to use the “gilded-boy story” to test patient’s memory and comprehension.

The story is about a boy who is chosen to play the part of an angel at the coronation of one of the popes 300 years ago. The boy, who is covered head to toe with gold foil for the coronation, falls ill and “although everything possible was done for his recovery except the removal of the fatal gold covering, he died within a few hours.” She responds:

What possible point could there be in telling this story to a patient immobilized in a neuro ICU at a major teaching hospital? What lesson could be drawn? Did they think that because it was a “story” it could be told without consequence? There was a morning on which the “gilded-boy story” seemed to represent, in its utter impenetrability and apparent disregard for the sensitivity of the patient, the entire situation with which I was faced.

Reading this book today we know that Ms. Didion’s daughter ultimately did not survive her traumatic illness. It’s amazing to think that she was able to write such a fluid memoir under the circumstances, but like the solace found in telling stories, writing them seems to have been the only way for her to live.

comments

Thanks for this. The Year of Magical Thinking is a tremendous book. I began reading it in a fury and then had to stop because some of it hit too close to home, although I will undoutedbly finish it. Didion was on Charlie Rose’s show last night and talked at length about how writing this book was her way of understanding her husband’s death and how to continue with her life in the face of it. She talked about constantly believing in one way or another that his death actually hadn’t happened and about how writing the book helped her to realize that he was gone. She also said something interesting about the place of grief in our culture, how we don’t really know about grief, how we’re not really allowed to grieve. We’re expected to take several days after the death of a loved one and then get back to our lives, but, as she told Rose, this isn’t possible because you’re in shock those first several days. Real grief happens after that.

I think Didion has achieved more clarity in a single book than some writers have achieved in entire careers.

    – Michael (10/26  at  02:14 AM)

Great post Bud.  I too put down everything else to read Didion’s book and found it eye-opening.  And I thought it amazing that you don’t get really sad or depressed reading this either.  I saw her speak, as I mentioned in my previous post, but was unable to record it.  Christopher Lydon was there though asking her questions for his Open Source Radio program, so I imagine it will be aired sometime soon.  She’s a pretty amazing lady (tiny bordering on scrawny).

    – Megan (10/27  at  03:45 PM)

Hey Bud

Funny you should write about this book. Last week I was in the emergency room waiting room of a hospital near Nashville, waiting to hear news of my mother who was admitted for umpteeenth time. I picked up a Time or Newswee issue that interviewed Joan Dideon. What struck me most about the interview wasn’t just the timing but her admission that she can often only clarify her thoughts through writing, otherwise she can go through life in a daze. Well she said it a lot more clearly than that! But that really struck a chord in me.

    – Mitchell Teplitsky (10/31  at  03:56 PM)

A 2005 Christmas present from my son, was Joan Didion’s book, “The Year of Magical Thinking”. Right now, I’m on chapter 10. I was curious about the “gilded-boy story”, therefore went to this site on the internet. Does it mean, “all that glitters is not gold” (or) “you can’t tell a book by it’s cover”? I love this book, and can relate incidents to my own life. I also love my son’s inscription in the book: Merry Christmas, Mom From one magical thinker to another--Love, Don---Now back to the book. Donna Wagberg

    – Donna Wagberg (01/22  at  11:51 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: October 25, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Joan Didion

• Comments:4
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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