From the Ledge

When my mom passed away several years ago, which had to be one of my watershed life experiences, I sent out an email to my close friends all over the world to let them know, and I included this quote from Joan Didion’s autobiographical book about coping with the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and the prolonged illness of their daughter, Quintana, “The Year of Magical Thinking”:  “…when we mourn for our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.  As we were.  As we are no longer.  As we will one day not be at all.”  I think it’s a beautiful quote, so articulately and delicately crystallizing with a minimum of words that almost indescribable state of tremendous grief, that sense of losing huge chunks of one’s self and one’s past and future with the loss of the loved one.   “The Year of Magical Thinking”  is one of the most important and memorable books I’ve ever read in my life; I finished it a couple of months before my mom entered the hospital for her very rapid, and ultimately failed, battle with kidney ailments, and I couldn’t have realized how prescient the book would be for capturing my emotional responses to my own forthcoming loss.  For Didion, in the book, powerfully, expressively, and relentlessly paints the various emotions that you go through when dealing with the loss of a loved one, and the terrifying possible loss of another – the anger, the discombobulation, the helplessness, the overwhelming pain, the sometimes gratuitous but always searing self-pity.  So I was very excited and curious to see how Didion adapted the book, so emotionally frank, so introspective, into a theatrical piece, now being given its Chicago premiere by the Court Theatre.   Although The Year of Magical Thinking, the play, is extremely well-written, and in the hands of Court Artistic Director Charlie Newell and actress Mary Beth Fisher, is masterfully, at times exquisitely, staged and performed, I missed some of the emotional clarity of the book.  I felt that the play was indeed a portrayal of “magical thinking” versus “magical grieving and feeling” which the book so invaluably, and unapologetically, provided.

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