The Stories We Tell

Narrative as Necessity

Didion’s opening sentence of The White Album — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — is the most important sentence she wrote, and its importance is not primarily literary but anthropological. It describes a fact about the human being: that we are creatures who require narrative to organize our experience, that without story we cannot make sense of what happens to us, and that the breakdown of narrative is experienced as a form of madness.

Her own breakdown — the psychic disorientation she describes in the essay, the dissolution of the narrative by which she had organized her life — is the experiential confirmation of the claim. She needed a story to live, and her story had fallen apart.

What The Year of Magical Thinking Reveals

Didion’s memoir of her husband’s sudden death is significant for TLA because its secular framework is so visibly insufficient to the experience it describes. Grief, in the book, is the condition of a person whose story has been interrupted — whose narrative has been severed at the point where the other person was essential to it — and who discovers that no secular account of death can provide what the experience demands.

The “magical thinking” of the title is her term for the irrational conviction that her husband might return if she does the right things — a conviction she knows is irrational and cannot stop having. It is, from TLA’s perspective, the residue of a hope that her secular framework has no place for: the hope of resurrection.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a narrative: the conflict between two seeds, the bruising and the crushing, the movement toward a resolution that has been promised but not yet fully arrived. The human creature’s need for narrative — which Didion names so precisely — is the need of a creature made for this story, whose deepest self requires a narrative large enough to give its existence meaning.

The story Didion needed and could not find in her secular framework is the story of the God who enters history, who dies and rises, and who promises that the death that interrupted her story will not be the last word about the person she loved. She could not tell that story. But her need for it is one of the most honest and most moving pieces of testimony in contemporary American prose.

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