We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
I actually finished the essay collections in this collection of collections last year (I have not read Salvador or Miami) but, as this blog did not exist in 2018, I decided to count it towards the 2019th year of the Common Era. I first learned of Joan Didion while in high school due to an assigned reading of her essay “Los Angeles Notebook” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It was a welcome departure from the vocabulary and grammar of 17th, 18th or even 19th century “Modern” English. She was like no writer I have ever read, or read ever since. Her phrasing and word choice were so precise yet so off-kilter compared to any journalism I had encountered. Didion would include specific yet seemingly specific details with such casual commentary that, like iconic movies, filled her essays full of hard-hitting, quotable sentences.
When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the storied I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.
Didion’s habits make more sense after hearing her biography. She began her career writing copy for Vogue, filling in the print for clothing and furniture ads, which explains her attuned eye for these things in her work. In her spare time, she wrote her first novel Run, River along with other magazine assignments. In these early years, the conservatism of a Silent generation Goldwater voter shines through the pages. Didion is critical of Communism, of progressive think tanks, of the so called hippies gathering in San Francisco. The comfortable, individualistic 50s were her kind of decade. By 1970 and beyond, you can see her thinking evolve. She is critical of narratives and appearances in general, even those of the Reagans, successors to the movement initiated by Goldwater. By the 1980s, Didion was openly political: writing about electioneering and the Central Park jogger.
Yet there was a special emotional undertow that derived in part from the deep and allusive associations and taboo attaching, in American black history, to the idea of the rape of white women.
These habits are not universally beloved. Her non-alignment can strike some as nihilistic and self-obsessed. Her attentiveness to clothing and decoration is merely a “bag of tricks”. Didion is style over substance. Her words often dizzy more than they reveal, often because “writing has not yet helped me [her] see what it means”. Such criticism can also be directed at Didion the person. The chic cool image on the cover hides a nervous reality. She can be incredibly socially inept1. Didion is not a normal woman nor a normal author. She certainly is different, and that is why her work is so adored.