In this view, mourning is a situated interpretive and communicative activity charged with establishing the meaning of the deceased's life and death, as well as the postdeath status of the bereaved within the broader community concerned with the loss. The authors therefore advocate a social constructionist model of grieving in which the narrative processes by which meanings are found, appropriated, or assembled occur at least as fully between people as within them. In contrast to dominant Western conceptions of bereavement in largely intrapsychic terms, the authors argue that grief or mourning is not primarily an interior process, but rather one that is intricately social, as the bereaved commonly seek meaning in this unsought transition in not only personal and familial, but also broader community and even cultural spheres. The acknowledgement of privacy's unequal distribution propels us to ask new questions about the relation between grief and racism in literary, political, and cultural spaces." The succession of black deaths enacts the spectacle of the disrespect for the lives and bodies of black families, for whom neither privacy nor access to public grieving is secure. Didion's oversized sunglasses emblematize her access to white privacy-they are a visor behind which she can veil her gaze and deflect the gaze of others. But it has to do with how the terrible repetition of successive deaths registers personal pain for the white family, who may invoke a zone of privacy in which to grieve and carry that privacy with them in public, as it exposes black families to the ongoing vulnerability of actual risk, extensive legal proceedings, and their unjust denouements. The Year of Magical Thinking is one of her best pieces of writing, but it partakes of some of the same deep flaws that beset her abundant worst.Įxcerpt: "The comparison between Didion's grief memoirs and a social justice movement forged in protest to racist killings and the failure to hold police accountable for them is hardly plain. When she is not present-as in her fiction and in her political writing (where she tries to understand the world without mediation through her personality)-she falls radically short. Joan Didion’s best writing has always been dependent on the presence of her own self, observing what she describes, observing herself describing it. This effect, one begins to suspect, is a calculated one. Her authorial decision to remain, as it were, ignorant of her daughter’s death creates a curious sense of disorientation-and also, inevitably, greater sympathy for an author who, the reader knows, is soon to become doubly bereaved. Thanks to the publicity surrounding the release of The Year of Magical Thinking, no reader can be unaware of this fact but, for the duration of the book, Didion herself seems not to be. Didion’s tale of what happened in that period is interwoven with her memories of her husband, her attempt to grasp the fact of his death and of her new solitude, and her investigation of the “literature of grief.” Unmentioned in these pages is the fact that, after the book was completed but months before its publication, her daughter Quintana Dunne also died. The “year” in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion’s greatly acclaimed new memoir, extends to the anniversary of the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne on December 30, 2004.
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