You Must Go Mad, Thank You!

This week I read and hated Joan’s Didion’ book, “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Because I hated it so much it stayed in my head and annoyed me. Clever!  Clever! Here’s a woman whose sudden loss of a husband of more than 40 years led to research as an antidote to unfathomable grief. 

Well, congratulations, Joan Didion, on the genius of self-control (this is why I don’t read modern American writers-too many awards for being smart, clever, and detached. Maybe the Romantic writers knew it best: Dickinson, Poe, Hawthorne got one ounce of objective life-giving truth from ten ounces of blood-letting emotion.)

One year later, Didion's pain started moving on, just in time for the New Year, as if grief was not a time-sucking leech that sat on your soul for an eternity and taunted you with rushing life, so near yet so unimportant.  Where’s was the soulful part of her research, the part she was suppose to respond with madness, the kind where others whispered, “I knew she was crazy,” "doesn't she know better," "isn't she a famous writer" “why can’t she keep it together?“ “it can’t be all that bad,” “move on,” “there are other relationships, men, women, friends,” "everything ends eventually," “live your life,” ”don’t waste time”--all shared from their perches of normal. That is until they go mad themselves because to live is to welcome it all, even the ugly, screeching little bats of experience that wait in darkness to unleash their feeling/flying fury.

Why didn't Didion shriek and wail until neighbors called the police and she was institutionalized? Why didn't she tear her clothes off and run naked around Central Park? Better yet, why didn't she tear each page in her research books and burn them in a pyre--in the middle of her living room? Why didn't God sit on her lap and give her hug and, to her surprise, she hugged him back (now that's magic)?

She talked about the vortex, but her vortex led to precious memories that got tangled in the urgent present. But didn’t anyone tell her the vortex was also the gateway to hell, and you followed it, opened its doors, and entered it with gratitude and pleasure.  Crazy? Sure.  Human? Thank you. Maybe I’m being too harsh. She also had daughter clinging to life in ICU; she had to keep it together. But can you research when life tears you psychic limb from limb, taunting you to comply (even Jesus had a breakdown on the Mount of Olives the night before his crucifixion)? She talked about some mysterious need/desire her husband could never articulate but always implied.   Maybe, he yearned for her heartfelt, non-processed, and non-researched reaction to any one thing.

I remember watching Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage.” For hours into the well-to-do, middle-class, divorcing couple’s story they were civil and pragmatic to one another.  “Don’t do it, Bergman," I thought.  "Please be real, brutal, and honest about the whole thing.” That is until the couple found themselves going blow to blow in an office several years after initiating their divorce, later finding their own brand of love, sex, and happiness--with each other--years after splitting while also being in relationships with other people.  Thank you, Bergman!

I felt more affinity and compassion with the Chinese girl http://news.yahoo.com/woman-throws-epic-tantrum-in-the-street-after-115957077.html) shrieked and convulsed for 90 minutes in a public square after her boyfriend dumped her in a text. I cried and laughed at her humanity. Thank you!

I'll never forgot the mother who wrote about jogging the day her young son was dying of leukemia in a hospital bed because she needed to "run with his soul to heaven." Thank you!


I once heard a dying priest's sermon in which he marveled with tears and weeping about learning the most important lesson of his life, even at death's door: he was to be as open to receiving as he was to giving, an experience he failed to accept with grace and honor his entire 50 years of service . Thank you!

I got shivers when reading the artist Karen Green’s interview in the Guardian after her famous writing husband, David Foster Wallace, committed suicide, in which she detailed her need to build "The forgiveness machine [that] was seven-feet long," she said, "with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell." The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto.” Here was a woman who could not forgive herself for not being there when her husband hanged himself, even though in one of his darkest episodes of depression, she stayed in the house with him for nine days. Thank you!    

I recalled my own overwhelming feelings after learning of my then husband’s infidelity. I was going to kick his lover’s ass, an idea that came to me like a bolt of brilliance while driving to work one morning-stepping on the gas, reaching his office at ninety-miles an hours, waiting in his secretary’s cubicle for the confrontation and opportunity to pull her hair, kick, scratch and bite her into awareness of my own grief, and eventually leaving a note (“Watch your back, bitch") on her computer screen when she didn’t show up.  Me, an educated woman with a masters in literature, two teenage children, and respectable job at a prestigious research hospital, who hated to swat at a fly, stepped into the madness. Read my exciting memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at: http://www.amazon.com