It was immeasurably important to me to have a role model who was a woman. Besides showing me what the architecture of writing nonfiction could be, Joan Didion made me feel it was possible to have the life and career I dreamed of. A Tweet by Susan Orlean who defines herself as Writer, writer, writer. Oh, I also write.
There is much in Didion one might disagree with personally, politically, aesthetically. I will never love the Doors. But I remain grateful for the day I picked up “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt. It must be hard for a young woman today to imagine the sheer scope of things that women of my generation feared women couldn’t do—but, believe me, writing with authority was one of them. Zadie Smith in The New Yorker.
I didn’t know that Joan Didion was such a giant, I think I thought she was a fringe player, maybe nothing more than a cult favorite, so I was surprised at the number of people, especially women, especially women writers, who were inspired by her. She made her living by writing and I – then ensconced even more in my white male bubble than I am today- didn’t understand how hard it was for a woman to make a living writing fifty years ago. I loved her writing but I didn’t always love what she wrote. It often made me uncomfortable.
Didion was a true Californian, a fifth-generation Californian – one set of her ancestors was actually part of the Donner Party until they left the main group, near the Humbold sink, to go north, taking the Oregon Trail in the fall of 1846 – and she was pretty haughty about it, but she didn’t see the same California that I did. She saw a darker California, a California that I didn’t want to acknowledge, that didn’t match the fantasy that I still hold on to so tightly. Still, the way she wrote, that was a revelation to me.
Democracy was the first Didion book I read and I loved it’s take on politics, but Slouching Towards Bethlehem was the second and, while I won’t say I hated it, I sure was bothered by the pictures of a California I didn’t want to exist. When she writes about a young woman from San Bernardino, who killed her husband, This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book … the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school. “We were just crazy kids,” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past, it seems so nasty, so petty and even today, I don’t want it to be true and am so afraid that it is a spot-on description of inland California.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been reading excerpts – highlights if you will – of her writing and I keep being reminded of why I liked her so much when I first read Democracy, and then Play it As It Lays which starts with a paragraph that, somehow, has been tattooed on my brain. Maybe that is the best place to end this post, with a typical Joan Didion paragraph in which everything is wrong – what does it even mean? Why does she say she would not ask about snakes and then ask about snakes? what is she trying to say? and where the hell are the question marks at the end of the questions? – and the paragraph is perfect. So ominous, we have no idea what is happening, but we know that it’s not going to end well. What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask. Another example, one that springs to mind because Mrs. Burstein saw a pigmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable ever since: I never ask about snakes. Why should Shalimar attract snakes. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive, while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not anymore.
