The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

I've tagged this book as "nonfiction" and "politics", although it's hard to imagine a more personal book.

In The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion writes about her husband's sudden death and her first year of grief. It's a multi-award winner.  It's a classic.  It has profound and universal things to say about grief and loss.

But what I want to talk about is simply this passage (from page 98 of the paperback edition):

"One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew, whether in New York or in California or in other places, shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice.  The management skills of these people was in fact prodigious. The power of the telephone numbers was in fact unmatched. I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events. If my mother was suddenly hospitalized in Tunis I could arrange for the American consul to bring her newspapers and get her on an Air France flight to meet my brother in Paris.  If Quintana was stranded in the Nice airport I could arrange with someone at British Airways to get her onto a BA flight to meet her cousin in London. Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful,  that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

What does this paragraph say to you?

I know what Didion is trying to say.  In this situation, Didion's lifetime of experience dealing with crises was useless.  Death does not negotiate.

I can't argue with that conclusion.

But the paragraph contains a second message.

It seems to me that the passage states that Didion has finally encountered a situation where her wealth and privilege is useless.  But Didion doesn't seem aware of that message.  Her own privilege is invisible to her:  it doesn't occur to her that not everyone has phone numbers, and that even if they did, those phone numbers would be useless. I could call the American consul until my fingers were numb and it's unlikely they would take my call let alone help my mother.  I didn't go to the right schools.  I don't have the right connections.  I don't have enough money. Fundamentally, I chose the wrong parents and the wrong background.  I am not privileged in the way that Didion has always been privileged.

Even more striking is that Didion calls her privilege "a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful" or "management skills".  She seems to really believe that she and her friends adroitly deal with crises by using "skills".  That is, they have used talent, time, and determination to develop an ability that they can use to accomplish an end.  And while I admit that there is probably an element of skill involved in effectively leveraging your unearned privilege to best effect, calling this a "management skill" is both blind and insulting.  Does Didion think that those who don't have the phone number of a Vice President at British Airways lacks skills?  Does she think that someone who doesn't get invited to the same cocktail parties as ambassadors lacks initiative?  Ability?  A positive "habit of mind'? Does she have any idea that she and her friends have been "very successful" because of their privilege rather than their "skills"?

It seems unlikely.

In the end, Didion's message is essentially the same.  Life and death situations are beyond our control, no matter how much we try to control them.

But the message she didn't mean to convey left me saying an involuntary "good!". My resentment of her sense of privilege made Didion's feeling of helplessness gratifying. I resented her sense of privilege.  I resented her blindness.  I resented the distorted world view that made her see her privilege as earned -- that is, "the very successful have management skills" rather than the actuality of "the very privileged have connections that give them an unearned advantage over those born in different circumstances."

I shouldn't resent her so much.  After all, we all have unearned privilege of different kinds.  It's just that this particular kind of privilege bothers me more than most, because, of course, it's a kind of privilege that I don't share.  My kids can't get into a fully subscribed program because I happen to know the director.  My parents didn't go to university, so they couldn't talk to someone and get me a summer job in a lab.  I don't "know how things work" or know the right people and the right phone numbers.

Didion's privilege and her blindness to this privilege is visible to me in a way that my own privileges are not.

In some ways I am grateful for that paragraph, however infuriating I found it.  Those words are a reminder.  In understanding the world you can and must start from where you are and who you are.  But don't forget that your experience is not everyone's experience. You almost certainly also have privileges that you take for granted.  Try to see them.  Try not to forget them.