This is not a definitive list, but it’s my list, and now, I’ll tell you why.
Let’s start with The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
What more can be said of Didion’s writing?
If you haven’t read Didion, you must. For pure technique and craft, her writing is miraculous. If I’m honest, I’m not always fond of her material. She likes to name drop *yawn, and her lifestyle smacks of privilege, but get past that, and read her for the craft.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes about the loss of her husband and her daughter’s illness. They both died within a year of each other, but she saves her daughter’s death for Blue Nights, which may be the better (but lesser known) book.
In the classes I teach, I often ask my students to show more. This is in part because showing is usually lacking in rough drafts and in novice writing, but really it’s not that difficult to teach. The “telling” is the more difficult craft. Easy to do poorly, but extraordinarily difficult to do well and artfully.
Of course, Didion can write a fine scene, but of exposition, Didion is the master.
Grief is a difficult subject. Writings about grief can feel maudlin or desperate. The writing might emote to the point that it loses the reader. Emote all you want into your journal, even your rough draft, but if you are writing for an audience other than yourself, you must take their feelings into consideration.
Didion’s writing is never maudlin. Instead it pulls the reader in almost unsuspectingly, deeper and deeper into the experience, into her world. Let me show you how:
I’ll draw from the second chapter. John’s death certificate has been issued. Didion has reminisced about a trip they took through the Mojave, and now we get to grief:
“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died: my father died a few days short of his eighty-fifth birthday and my mother…” Didion comes at grief indirectly by giving examples of the painful but lesser emotions: “sadness, loneliness,…to acknowledge…pain and helplessness and physical humiliation.”
Didion is setting us up for a compare and contrast so that we can more thoroughly realize her emotion without resorting to the more convenient — but less engaging — hand wringing that we might be tempted into.
Even on these in-the-past events, she digs deep: After her mother’s death, Didion receives a letter from a former-priest friend. “Despite our preparation,” he writes, “despite our age,” the death of a parent “dislodges things deep in us” and we are buffeted by “recollections.”
Didion continues, “My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry.”
I love this line. It speaks to the inevitability of carrying on, but in this passage, Didion is actually reflecting on and reinforcing the power of the sorrow she felt in those moments.
"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means." — Joan Didion
Now that we know how bad that other thing was, we can move on to grief.
“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
There is more, but I’ll skip to the quote from a study done by a psychiatrist who interviewed family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove Fire: “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves…a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen…”
Didion repeats: “Tightness in the throat. Choking, need for sighing.”
Anyone who has experienced intense grief will recognize these sensations, and anyone who hasn’t will glimpse the writer’s experience.
Didion then takes these sensations and applies them to her loss: “Such waves began for me on the morning of December 31, 2003.” Here Didion recounts the hours in which the ambulance arrives, and John is taken to the hospital.
The reader reawakens back in the narrative.
How do we write about a difficult subject?
Didion offers at least five techniques: circling around to compare and contrast, using example, appealing to authority, quoting a source, and applying definition. I’ve taken the emotion out of these techniques purposely so that you can see them for what they are. Truly though, I suggest you read the book for yourself. Perhaps read it once for the story. Then read it again to study Didion’s techniques.
I first read this book after Kath MacLean recommended it during a class I took of hers on writing creative nonfiction. I enjoyed it enough, but it wasn’t until I reread it in preparation for writing my memoir that I realized the real value of the text.
I knew in writing my memoir that I’d be dealing with a lot of big emotions — I wasn’t wrong — and I knew this might present new challenges — it did. Over several months, I read all the memoirs I could about grief and loss to see what worked and what didn’t. It wasn’t always a pleasant activity, but it was necessary. The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights were two of the books I read then.
You don’t need to be writing about loss, though, to learn from Didion. I also recommend Slouching Toward Bethlehem, her collection of essays (most of which were previously published in The Saturday Evening Post). The topics are mostly no longer current, but the essays give you a singular view into the America of the 1960s and again, technique! This time, she gives a masterclass on narrative long-form journalism.
This is part 1 of a 5-part series. Next, I’ll write about One Native Life by Richard Wagamese. If you found this post useful, hit the Subscribe button.
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