Magical Thinking

I read Joan Didion's book last night. I hadn't before--though loss is a topic that interests me--because I haven't read any of her other books--nor her husband's--and it felt intrusive to pore over her life right now. STB and Daria made me take notice, though; I'll read more--I'll read her backwards. And it's the third copy of this book I've bought; I gave the other two as gifts. Intention tips the scales.

Daria wrote to her, c/o Knopf, and Didion wrote back. I won't write to her, but it's impossible not to want to. The living tend to remember the best about the dead--not the annoying stuff, not the quarrels--and her life with Dunne, in her rememberances, is so alien and so fantastic to me. So alluring. 40 years together because they wanted to be together: working from home--together constantly. 40 years of family photos, of important moments and incidentals. 40 years of shared habit and process. She was extremely lucky, I think, even given the pain and dislocation now; how many of us get that kind of connection with another human being--even for a year, much less our entire adult lives?

The book is a constant comparison between luck and loss: between rich memory and barren landscape. Everything reminds her of something else; she guards against doing things or going places that will lead her to memories that hurt, but it's impossible: life is referential. You know she must have an enormous circle of friends--people who watch out for her, who call her and take her places to keep her engaged, etc. But it's the few who are closest--the one, maybe--who can help. When you lose the intimate, who in the throng can reach you?

That will never happen to me. I couldn't help but think it, the entire time I was reading. My kids, my mother, my older sister--those are my inner circle, each with built-in limitations in terms of connection. Granted, I'm in a certain mood this week. (Also--defense or fact--I'm a very independent person. I don't know what kind of person Didion is.) But just as I could have gone to med school when I was accepted (instead I had a child on my own), you can't help but look back on choices that brought you to the life you have, and wonder what you'd have been had you gone the other way. I've been thinking--entirely predictably--about a man who ran a writing program at a university that used to employ me, and how he'd sing me love songs and wait on my stoop with dinner, and offered me a scholarship to quit work and take the writing seminar program, and how I kept him at a distance because his enthusiasm made me wary; what kind of white guy waits for me on a stoop in downtown Baltimore? (I still think there was a little bit of crazy in him. But you know what I mean: people love us, we get suspicious. "What's YOUR problem?")

I read earlier in the week about a woman in the U.K. who lives out of her car, showers occasionally at a local hospital, and, unaccountably, blogs. Found her blog, and read enough--read until her unwillingness to change her life irritated me.