Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking

After finishing "A Private Battle", I thought that Joan Didion's notes on the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, "The Year of Magical Thinking" would be an appropriate book to read next. It had been well reviewed and my wife liked it very much. Dunne, who had a heart condition thought under control had a fatal coronary having dinner with his wife in their New York apartment. They had returned from a hospital visit to their 30-something year old daughter, who was suffering from sepsis (and who herself would die a few months after her father), It was clearly a terrible year.

Unfortunatley, I found the book (even though quite short) tendentious, and repetitive, and filled with literary quotes and illusions which might have been familiar to Didion, but which appeared more likely to have been taken from a book of quotations she might have kept at her writing desk. I just did not enjoy it.

Why the difference between my reaction to the two books? I can't say in an objective way. But the contrast in my mind was great, as was the contrast between Didion's book and another spousal-medical book I had read a year or so ago, Morton Kondracke's "Saving Milly", about his wife to-be-fatal battle with Parkinson's Disease. As a reporter, I am not fond of Kondracke; but this book I thought extraordinary.

Perhaps it goes to perceptions of honesty. The Ryan and the Kondracke books seemed to me to be brutally honest, painting the authors with shortcomings as well as heroic virtues. I did not see the Didion book in the same manner. I saw it as more of a staged piece. I cannot blame her; it could easily have been me.