It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotion with general reality, imposes-as Didion has it, perfectly, in “ The White Album”-“a narrative line upon disparate images.” But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. The same goes for “magical thinking.” Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. A sentence meant as an indictment has transformed into personal credo. How else to explain the odd ways we invert her meanings? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Perhaps when your subject is human delusion you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it. It is a peculiarity of Joan Didion’s work that her most ironic formulations are now read as sincere, and her sincerest provocations taken with a large pinch of salt.
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