The universality of grief is undeniable: grief is perhaps the most common emotional trauma (Joan Didion notes that it is “the most general of afflictions”), and its annals pervade literature.  Several prominent authors mourned significant others in recent years, and have written memoirs as their way of dealing with the trauma. The response to these pieces—both that of readers and of critics—is immediate, overwhelming, and heartfelt. Critical analysis seems an inadequate response to the sheer poignancy of the loss and grief conveyed in these works. The New York Times review of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, for example, was written by Robert Pinsky, who addresses the subject in emotional terms even as he employs analytical ones. “Didion is ultimately less like a camera than a precise seismograph,” he concludes. Critics were not the only ones so affected by these works. The publication of Calvin Trillin’s essay “About Alice” provoked a flood of letters to The New Yorker and eventually resulted in the publication of a book. Trillin’s memoir stands on the shelf next to the memoirs of other widowed writers, volumes which resonated so deeply with readers that they were adapted into screenplays: John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris inspired the movie Iris, for which Judi Dench received an Academy Award nomination, and The Year of Magical Thinking is now a one-woman play starring Vanessa Redgrave.

With confessional literature swamping the market, the success of these books seems a foregone conclusion. We’ve developed a taste for peering into other people’s personal lives. Certainly there is an element of train wreck fascination with these books and this subject—that sense of being so close to disaster, riveted (as Pinsky says of Magical Thinking, “the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative: a forced expedition”), and completely unable to turn away. If we’re very, lucky, this is the kind of grief that we will only experience once in a lifetime and so,we perhaps drawn to these narratives out of morbid curiosity. What does life-changing grief look like? How does one deal with the trauma of losing the most important person in his or her life? But most of all, I believe we respond to work like Bayley’s, Trillin’s and Didion’s because they are exquisitely crafted, and because their subject matter is not primarily about grief, but about love. After all, as New Yorker contributor Andrew Solomon has observed, “To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose:” beneath monumental grief, the scaffolding of exquisite love can be found.

On the shelf, literature of mourning has a simple, distinctive look: a plain white cover, a plain font, and perhaps a commemorative photo. In the case of Trillin's About Alice, the photo is that of Trillin and Alice on their wedding day, a photo that the legions of Trillin's fans probably never saw. This couple  is an ordinary one—a grinning man with a receding hairline, proudly holding the hand of a beautiful blonde in a smart suit, a half-pace in front of her as they stride towards the camera. This blonde is Alice, and in no way does she resemble what she feared Trillin's descriptions made her out to be: a fearsome disciplinarian—in her own words, “a dietitian in sensible shoes.”  A dedicated food writer, Trillin created a “sitcom” of his family, in which the “marginally goofy” father and husband had to be occasionally restrained by his sensible wife.

Is this the truth of their relationship? Given the complex compromise and disagreements central to every long-term relationship, it seems unlikely. Trillin presents what appears to be the simplest picture of a marriage—a perfect union between two people who are perfect for each other. Perhaps the reason the book was passed so fervently from hand to hand when it was published was because of this deliberately false simplicity. Trillin claims to give us an intimate portrait of Alice when both he and his readers know that it is truly impossible.

In this light, the details that Trillin reveals are at once discreet and telling—ones that only he knows about Alice and yet barely get down to the truth of her. For example, he discloses that Alice edited all of his work, translating words like “heuristics” for him. This insignificant detail seems to shore up his initial stereotype—the absent-minded writer, turning to his editor-wife and disciplinarian for help. And yet it reveals nothing. Do we love our secretaries or our office assistants deeply and devotedly for their eye for detail? Do we say of our receptionists, as Trillin did, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

Perhaps betraying the difficulty that he must have had in the telling, the book is itself a slim volume—About Alice is about Alice, yes, but it could never illuminate Alice's most essential qualities. We know Alice was beautiful, yes—she was also compassionate, educated and highly intelligent. But from the very start, Trillin realizes that the main reason his readers love Alice is because he so obviously did, and does. This is probably the reason why the most famous quote from the book was not even written by Trillin himself.  In a letter sent to Trillin, expressing her sympathy shortly after Alice's death, a young woman explained how deeply Trillin's love had affected her own life. Trillin reports, “Sometimes she looked at her boyfriend and thought, ‘But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?’”

Trillin, of course, is a journalist, and trained in a different school than either Bayley or Didion. His writings for The New Yorker—edited by William Shawn, who fostered a restrained, gentlemanly style at the magazine—exhibit polite restraint.  But how much do we gain as readers when more of a relationship is revealed by a writer with different inclinations? With its minute examination of his beloved, human foibles and all, Bayley creates a different kind of work altogether. Perhaps one of the reasons Elegy for Iris is so different from About Alice is because Bayley wrote it while Iris was still living, albeit crippled by Alzheimer’s disease. It’s easier to forgive your spouse her flaws once she’s no longer around to remind you of them.

From the very beginning, Bayley makes it known that his devotion to his wife is not free from regrets, ambiguity or sadness. The first memory he recounts of Iris is a swimming trip, a lighthearted summer adventure that has to be cut short because Iris has a lunch date with another man. Of course, she invites Bayley along, and he has a sense of privilege, of being allowed into the parts of her life that she had previously held distant from everyone else. This is a situation that most would find awkward at best. But Iris, Bayley and Maurice Charlton navigate it with aplomb.

This sense of innocence—and of privilege—remains the primary characteristic of Bayley’s relationship with Iris. John Bayley met Iris Murdoch while he was a graduate student in literature at Oxford, and she a don; he was a relatively fresh-faced twenty-eight, straight out of the World War II, and she had reached the ripe old age of thirty-four. In the movie Iris, as a baffled young Bayley (portrayed by Hugh Bonneville) struggles to cope with Iris’s frequent infidelities and general flakiness, his acceptance of the terms of their relationship appears to be doddering foolishness . Although I suspect many readers arrive at a similar conclusion, the book’s depiction of their relationship is far more nuanced. Can you see your partner for all her flaws, and continue to love her despite them? Bayley clearly does, and did.

Where Alice was clearly peerless in Trillin’s eyes, his muse as well as editor, Bayley realizes his wife has many eccentricities. In some ways, her frequent affairs are the least of these. He describes her as “a little bull”: “Not unfriendly, but both resolute and unpredictable, looking reflectively out from under lowered brows as it walks with head down towards you.” He is bemused by how attractive both men and women find his bull-like, diminutive wife. Bayley depicts the atmosphere of academic Oxford in the 1950s as incredibly salacious as he writes of rampant sexual harassment of both the obvious and subtle varieties.  Bayley describes Iris obediently distributing sexual favors among various prominent intellectuals: “. . . she usually gave her favors out of admiration and respect for, so to speak, the godlike rather than the conventionally attractive or sexual attributes in the men who pursued her.”

Even after the relationship between the two becomes more serious, Bayley was aware that he was only one of Iris’s lovers. She soothes him “. . . just by being the self she always was with [him], which [he] knew to be wholly and entirely different from any way that she was with other people.” He senses that he is special to her because he is the one person to whom she allows herself to open up. As Bayley describes the sensation, “She seemed to be giving way to some deep need of which she been wholly unconscious: the need to throw away not only the maneuvers and rivalries of intellect but also the emotional fears and fascinations, the power struggles and surrenders of adult loving.”

How does someone endure what most would consider indignities, at the very least? If you love someone, you endure it, and the most striking characteristic of Elegy for Iris is how all of Iris’s eccentricities strike Bayley as charming and lovable—even her habit of collecting garbage, for example, which he calls “Buddha-like.” Bayley’s ability to forgive, and even celebrate Iris’s imperfections might strike us as one of the primary features of what we call love. But Iris remains essentially an enigma to him: He describes—with joy—the solitude of marriage as the process of “growing closer and closer apart.”

 
Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent in Elegy for Iris.

Trillin reveals little of a love affair, Bayley reveals more—and perhaps the reason that Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking drew so much critical and popular attention was because it is by far the most raw, naked portrait of grief of the three. Didion’s tragedy has a mythic depth: her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a fatal coronary on the night before New Year’s Eve, only a few short days after their only daughter fell into a coma from septic shock (she would die a year later, after the book was published). If Bayley found it necessary to reveal more of his relationship because Iris was still alive, Didion doubtless found it necessary to reveal everything because she was still grieving—not only the loss of the love of her life, but of the child born of that love as well.

While Trillin was a writer married to a reader and editor, and Bayley was a critic married to a writer, Didion and Dunne were both writers. They collaborated on the same projects, and their days were spent “within the sound of each other’s voices,” as Didion recalls. This is not dissimilar to the relationship between Iris and John Bayley; they, too, spent their days together. But while Iris and Bayley found it necessary to include many spaces of privacy within their relationship even before Alzheimer’s set in, Didion and Dunne were inseparable—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Didion chronicles one episode in which she submits her first column to Life magazine. She created a stir among her readers from the first sentence—“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce” —and concerned friends and readers contacted her to ask if John had read it. “Read it?” she wrote. “He edited it.”

The Year of Magical Thinking has achieved massive critical and popular success. Part of this success is voyeurism, of watching a famously restrained and successful woman collapse. Before her double tragedy, Didion and her family enjoyed the kind of lifestyle that regular readers of The New York Times can only dream about: John and her daughter Quintana would, for example, frequently fly to San Francisco from Los Angeles for the night to meet Didion for dinner. They combined commercial success with a relaxed, bohemian everyday routine, and were personal friends with the literati of the day—indeed, Calvin Trillin read at John’s funeral. Didion, with her precise diction and sorority background, personified dignity and restraint. In The Year of Magical Thinking, we are witness to this elegant woman breaking down. “Grief,” Didion notes, in her most honest writing to date, “makes us crazy.”

And Didion’s grief is exacerbated by the unique nature of her marriage. Most relationships preserve a measure of distance, if only because spouses have separate careers. Didion and her husband collaborated on the same projects, and were separated so rarely that she realizes, after his death, that she doesn’t have a single letter from him. There was never a need. Indeed, Didion is struck by a statement in the medical literature of grief— “One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another,” she says. What constitutes dependency? Their regular mid-morning walks in the park?

Didion’s book was such a success because it spoke to the parts of the grieving process that we are trained to ignore, or keep hidden. We are trained to deal with grief rationally—to continue working, and go on. On the surface, Didion seems a prime example of someone who is strong enough to deal with grief. Even the emergency room personnel, hours after her husband's death, describes her as “a cool customer.” And yet the depths of her “magical thinking” is such that she spends a year denying that her husband is dead—to the extent that she saves his shoes for when he comes back. She cannot suppress the need to discuss John's own death with him. “There was nothing I did not discuss with John,” she says.

This is a critic’s view. But perhaps there is another layer of attraction to these works—perhaps Didion achieved such success because her marriage was one of the kind that many people aspire to, a partnership committed and absolute, where everything is shared. Perhaps those of us who wish we could find one person with whom to share all our waking moments and all of our thoughts are drawn to literature such as Didion’s, Bayley’s, and Trillin’s out of a desire to learn the anatomy of a relationship like theirs. These are less stories of death than they are stories of life, and love. In that case, the designation of these novels as “mourning literature” might be inaccurate; they might be more properly termed “marriage literature.” Loving someone does carry the caveat of eventual grief. In most cases—as in these three—it may be difficult, but it’s always worth it.