Art Retrospective: ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ by Joan Didion

“Life changes fast.

Life changes in an instant.”

When Joan Didion wrote these opening lines of The Year of Magical Thinking, she was describing the speed with which a familiar life can become unrecognizable. In October 2026, the book turns 21 years old. 

21 is an age we have culturally designated for beginnings. At 21, however, I find myself bending towards endings. I felt the weight of this at the university clubs fair, navigating rows of folding tables crowded with first-years, filled with the enviable optimism that time is an unlimited resource. Watching them collect glossy pamphlets, Didion’s thesis felt more like a diagnosis.

I have spent the past few years of university on a conveyor belt, treating the present as a series of midterms, assignments, lab reports, and finals. It feels like an intermission I have to go through before life can properly happen. 

There is a magical kind of thinking inherent to the undergraduate brain: the conviction that life can be postponed. You tell yourself that you are temporarily too busy to see your friends, too tired to leave your room, or incapable of taking a trip. You decline an invitation because there is an exam on Monday. Then, without announcement, the peers you saw at parties on weekends are packing for internships in Calgary or Toronto. They now work at banks and open tax-free savings accounts. The late-night debriefs that once revolved around house parties shift, seamlessly and terribly, to whether anyone has begun indexing a retirement account.

Didion understands this impulse toward postponement. In her memoir, she recalls the month before John Gregory Dunne, her husband, died. He expressed a desire to go to Paris. Didion hesitated, insisting on logistics, arrangements, and deadlines. He said, “If I don’t go now, I don’t think I ever will again.” They made the trip, and the American Express bill arrived in the mail with the charges from Paris. But by then, he was gone, and he would never see Paris again.

In Didion’s account of her 40 years of marriage, the details preserved are rarely the milestones. The awards and professional triumphs are ornamental. Instead, she preserves the smaller, domestic fragments: telling John her dreams and having him listen, an afternoon when he took their daughter to the zoo so Didion could work, driving her to a Western Union office so she could file a piece. Conversations, afternoons, errands — the details that seem too ordinary to catalogue become, in the end, the evidence of a life.

It is a grand presumption to decide in advance which moments will matter to us. We imagine graduation as a clean break, as if walking across a stage in a cap and gown will finally release us into real life. We believe that everything preceding the ceremony is merely a dress rehearsal. But we were living during the late nights in the library. We were living when we sat on a curb at Whyte Avenue with friends, extravagantly wasting time.

Standing on the Quad, I realized that I had been so preoccupied with waiting for my life to begin that I had forgotten to live in it. The quiet walks across campus in Alberta’s -40℃ weather, the brief exchanges between lectures, the invitations accepted and those declined. None of these were intermissions. They were life itself.

Didion’s memoir is a brutal reminder that time has no regard for our calendars. Her life changed on an ordinary Tuesday night — she sat down to dinner, and by 10:18 p.m., John was gone. Life does not wait for us to finish preparing for it. It just happens.

I looked at the first years at the clubs fair, still operating under the assumption that they have years to figure out their lives. I hope they do. But I also hope they notice the floor beneath their feet. I am trying to do the same. To step off the conveyor belt, to pay attention to the ordinary afternoon while it is still an afternoon, and to inhabit the life I keep imagining will start later.

Because life changes fast. And life, as Didion knew, changes in an instant.