Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is a love story. Its primary focus is grief, which functions as a way of measuring what has been lost, not only as its located in a person, the lost beloved, but also faith in the good life. It’s the prevailing conclusion of romance: failure to exact what was promised or expected.
Near the end of the novel, Didion writes:
“I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation. I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm.”
An author may write in any ending to a story, and will often do so in an attempt to make sense of the failure. If a relationship fails the conventional sense — it stops functioning as such — we pick up broken pieces, corral them into a narrative, an arc, a story. It’s a way of writing in a happy ending, to alleviate grief.
Throughout the novel, Didion catalogues her relationship with John Dunne, her late husband who passed suddenly at the dinner table one evening, while their only daughter lay unconscious in the ICU (for 5 days, at the time of John’s death). Foundational to Didion’s grief is the question of desert: weren’t things bad enough already? How could so many bad things happen congruously? How much bad is possible at any given moment? If a person fundamentally believes in possibility, sustains faith in life or in hope, then how can a person make sense of this? The conclusion of Didion’s relationship, marked by the death of her husband, suggests an alternate possibility: some things are just bad. There is no arc, no redemption. Everything is shitty. And if there is no redemption for this story, Didion asks, then what is stopping all stories from being like this? There is a new ending or at least a new way to end, one that does not require a silver lining or a logic, or even renders an alternate (positive) reading impossible.
Didion juxtaposes the specific memories of her marriage — Morton’s, Honolulu — with the hyper-specific details of John’s death, inventorying and marrying the thing’s existence with its loss. By attaching his existence to the challenging facts of his death, Didion navigates the complexities of keeping the dead alive. She posits: how could he be dead if he was just alive? As though every proof of life may serve to confirm the impossibility of death.
In this specific case, proof of life is proof of love, or vice versa. Didion and John had been together so long that their lives were constituted by one another. So what becomes of a life when the lover is gone? If the life, or the good version of it, is made possible and real by the person, then what happens next? One of the more challenging aspects of grief is dealing with the specific pain associated with lost futures, imagined but never realized but somehow no less real. Or less real and maybe this is what makes it so much worse.
In the film Godard Mon Amour, two people fail at love. The film concludes with Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Luc Godard’s young wife, remarking that the relationship is over. There is no more magic in it. The structure of the relationship is different from Didion and Dunne’s — where Didion and Dunne were peers professionally, Wiazemsky (at nearly 20 years younger than Godard) credits much of her career to his influence. However, in either relationship, we encounter a male antagonist deeply disillusioned with his own work and his industry, and a female protagonist trying to hold it together on everyone’s behalf. Godard Mon Amour concludes with Godard’s suicide attempt while visiting Wiazemsky on set of a film she is featuring in, in Italy. She describes the attempt as an unforgivable affront against her.
The conclusion of either relationship deals with the loss of a possibility and a memory — a real relationship that happened, that has since been lost to time, space, etc. The question of romance fundamentally being, as always: can it, can anything, be sustained?
I was in love or I still am. But it’s not the same. And we come into the world alone, we leave it alone. We spend much of our time on the planet attempting to refute this fact. We attempt to be less alone, to rely on forms of life constructed to counter or, at least, conceal our aloneness. We get married and we say, “Til death do us part,” recognizing that death is a solitary action but also making an impossible promise. Godard and Wiazemsky were in love, yet the love story falls apart. Even as the “relationship” is sustained, they are both made aware of exactly how alone they are within it — the relationship only serves to punctuate this point. Discontent in a relationship will do that — make you aware that it was all a farce, after all, that while we may feel less alone for a moment, we are still, in fact, an impenetrable, autonomous thing, comprised only of the obligations we have projected onto ourselves. And if we are that, then he she they are that too. And, well, if we’re all autonomous, we’re all quite alone, in the end.
Someone is here until they are not. The brain in any case is trying to make sense of how loss is possible — as a person is more than a person but also a possibility (the possibility of not being alone, principally). Once someone has been invested with possibility, perhaps has animated possibility by changing possibility to reality, if only for a moment, then the loss is not only a loss of possibility but a loss of further possibility, where the possibility can be furthered because it’s already been proven possible. Change is the nature of things, but the challenge with accepting change is that things change.
So, put simply, every love story, every good love story, is also a story about grief, about the inevitable and ultimate realization that love fulfills a need (we are born needing others after all — unable to eat, sit up, lift our tiny tender heads on our own) and also whets a flimsiness. The flimsiness is not the necessity of our being alone but its inevitability, and our belief that we may subvert that and write a new ending onto human need, where memory may stand in for company.