Joan Didion

Am I an outlier for preferring the After Henry-Miami-Political Fictions phase of her career? I understand that stylistically she needed to sort herself out in STB and The White Album.

no, i dont think it makes you an outlier. she certainly got *better* as a writer, thinker, reporter. i think stb/wa, aside and/or plus their merits as writing, have also become her canonical books because they're "documents of the 60s/70s" or whatever, and i'm not sure the 80s/90s have the same hold (yet!) on the public imagination. plus for certain people (like me) who fancy themselves writers while also trying to mentally sort themselves out, then stb/wa have a certain special hold.

As a recorder of the moods, inchoate longings, and designs of a period, she sounded like no one else, but I flip through STB and TWHA when I want what I look for in the later volumes: affectless asides about the Doors, the Reagans, Hollywood, etc. At the beginning she chose, in my view, subjects as correlatives for her confusion.

haha yeah i cant imagine someone of didion's intelligence choosing to hang out at a doors session except to find the zero point of lassitude and futility of that era.

the first thing i ever read by didion was the 3-4 paragraphs about the doors session in 'the white album,' taken out of context and put in a cheap-o book of rock articles, where it read kind of funnily in between articles about sabbath's first tour and james brown's legal problems.

to the person who mentioned Ellen Willis in the above thread... thanks! I just finished reading her latest collection of essays and reviews about Rock music, and loved the book... I was vaguely aware of who Willis was, and had read some a little of her writing, but being reminded of her compelled me to buy the latest collection... so thanks again! Sadly, Willis died in 2006...

BZ has all the best lines in Play It As It Lays: "You're not exactly a shot of meth tonight anyway."

I got A Book of Common Prayer for $3 in the Borders liquidation sale (I could see this sentence in a Didion essay). How does it compare with the other novels?

It's remarkably disappointing and mediocre.

hey team didion: can anyone point me in the direction of a all-of-a-sudden-while-at-my-folks-place-for-the-holidays-very-relevant JD quote i'm looking for? there's something - it coulda been in the last one - that she said about using the best plates, and how everyday is the day you should use the best plates. is this ringing any bells? she may have the edge over me in having phrased this well.

thank you in advance from me and my plate hoarding family

― schlump, Saturday, 25 December 2010 17:21 (9 months ago) Bookmark

just for anyone else for whom this has very occasionally been frustrating:

Didion once said she believed in using the good silver every day, because "every day is all there is."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09donadio.html?pagewanted=all

The NYT review of Blue Nights.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/the-cordial-enmity-of-joan-didion-and-pauline-kael

New York Review of Books weighs in. I only read the first page of the review, I've got the book but haven't gotten to it yet - it sounds incredible.

this is a very terrifying, painful book.

my sister is going to hear her read (tonight?) in DC! i am afraid to read this book, guys.

you should be! staring contest with the abyss imo.

i read the year of magical thinking five years ago, and i'll probably grab this one later today

this might be a trivial observation, but when "the year of magical thinking" came out, i remember realizing that the cover spelled out a coded "JOHN," made out of highlighted letters in Didion's name and the book's title. it felt poignant and primal and almost incantory. when i saw this book had a similar cover, i looked and saw that there were highlighted letters again: this time they just spell out "NO."

so basically this book has made me weep and i literally haven't opened it yet.

so my sister says the new book is not that good, but also, as a data point on the whole is joan didion a mean girl question upthread, my sister said she was incredibly lovely and kind at this reading she went to.

like, personally, to my sister and others attending.

aww. i am going to the nypl thing in a week or so, psyched.
i saw this book today in a store, i'd kinda planned to wait til the reading to pick it up (if they even do that at nypl? or they loan it you?, or?) but am tempted to try to grab it first.

the JOHN/NO thing is deliberate & v neat imo, there's a story in some article somewhere about the designer mentioning it to JD, who'd missed it

The recent KCRW Bookworm interview with Didion is worth a listen.

silverblatttttttttttttttt

caitlin flanagan is one of the larger reasons i no longer subscribe to the atlantic (and she definitely shouldn't be accusing anyone of being a 'tired espouser of the most doctrinaire . . . political opinions'), but:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/the-autumn-of-joan-didion/8851/?single_page=true

To find the details that these women loved so well that they remembered them verbatim, he would have had to pass over most of Joan Didion’s extensive nonfiction body of work and go back to the beginning, to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968, and to The White Album, in 1979. If you love Joan Didion so much that she fundamentally changed the way you think—and there are many who feel this way—the books that did this to you are those two and no others.

one need not read past this nonsense claim, really

yeah. i read that, because the awl linked to it, taking up the criticism of didion and dunne as parents in particular. i admit it's less horrible than other things caitlin flanagan has written and yet.

maud newton's comments on the awl's link to it seem p much otm to me:

Maud Newton (#600)

Flanagan writes about Didion's parenting as though Didion herself doesn't see any problem with her parenting. In fact, her self-flagellation is the most intense and unsettling thing about Blue Nights, which for my money is a much more powerful piece of writing than The Year of Magical Thinking.

And the bit about the young Didion's anxious behavior at a dinner party and inappropriate wearing of a Chanel suit says far more about Flanagan and her own mother, it seems to me, than it does about Didion.

Maud Newton (#600)

@deepomega I'm not saying Didion is beyond reproach, nor do I think Didion herself would argue that she is. Nevertheless, Flanagan's tone and approach rankle me, as they almost always do.

re: flanagan's tone, that lady has never met an adverb modifying an adjective she didn't like. "viciously well-read" "hysterically sycophantic" she lays it on a little thick.

xp
lol <3 aero

horseshoe I tried to read emma by jane austen

oh no did you hate it?

I was talking about how much it sucked to a friend, I kept mentioning it, day after day, then she told me clueless was based off of it so I can't hate it that much

I was flying for about 40 hours total and I had ulysses, emma and a brautigan book I had read already, but then I lost ulysses on one leg so I was stuck w/ emma or real steel starring hugh jackman

also, that caitlin flanagan article. i mean, she's not wrong about the experience of reading didion as a woman, exactly, but i'm not comfortable with her take on what being a woman is. and this is a pretty fucking limited account of Didion's genius imo: "Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has." that article feels like it's participating in the same essentialist romanticization of womanhood that flanagan's father was when he said, "there's something weird going on with joan didion and women," except i guess maybe flanagan takes women more seriously than her father did. maybe.

clueless is the most austenian austen adaptation also i hate u >:[

no no I like clueless

also i resent the parallelism between didion and thompson even though, yes, again, she's not wrong, because didion is a much greater writer. i think that's why she meant so much to me when i first read her, yes she's a woman, but she's also a woman who wrote circles around her male cohort, which felt like a vindication to me. this is very petty, obviously, and i wouldn't presume to generalize it to other female Didion fans.

xp oh i understood you perfectly

I can't make it thru emma either, I want to time travel back to the land of emma and make everybody do bong hits until they loosen up a little

I find didion inoffensive and her popularity is quite puzzling, to me, in one respect I guess because I really don't see what's so special about her, but this takedown is pretty tacky

i don't really think it was intended as a takedown! also everyone itt shut up about emma shut up shut up shut up!

not long after the discussion upthread (6 months ago) i found an old hardcover copy of slouching towards bethelehem in a charity shop for $3 and bought it, hoping to like it, but i still havent read it

nb I didn't end up reading most of the article (like emma), only made it thru to the chanel suit part and assumed it was a takedown

i mean caitlin flanagan is kind of mean-spirited so i guess even her tributes come out barbed (and over-adverbed!) but i believe didion means something to her

Lamp I don't think that's the Didion book for you but you might like Democracy

do you not like slouching, aero?

There can’t be a novelist who writes with more authority about clothes. If you are going to pay serious attention to women—to their sense of themselves, their position (social, political, economic), their assumptions about the face they are presenting to their world, it helps a good deal if you know exactly what they are wearing.

i think this sorta sums up my misgiving with the way flanagan is misreading both didion and women in this article: i think this is very true in a small way but absurdly wrong in a large one, i suppose its partly mistaking oneself and ones prejudices for the world idk

also everyone itt shut up about emma shut up shut up shut up!

<3 <3 <3

"Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has."

ohh lord

this is a sentence someone was paid money for

I read this Tuesday and shook my head after every sentence.

Also: Emma is marvelous because the heroine is as cerebral and penetrating as the writer herself, which is why you should try Mansfield Park first

didion rules Flanagan drools

Was looking at the Amazon page for the Blue Nights "enhanced" Kindle edition:

This enhanced eBook edition of Blue Nights includes three short films directed by Griffin Dunne and starring Joan Didion. Each film blends Didion's incisive prose with images and mementos from her daughter's life.

also i resent the parallelism between didion and thompson even though, yes, again, she's not wrong, because didion is a much greater writer. i think that's why she meant so much to me when i first read her, yes she's a woman, but she's also a woman who wrote circles around her male cohort, which felt like a vindication to me. this is very petty, obviously, and i wouldn't presume to generalize it to other female Didion fans.

I don't disagree, but the parallel is one of popularity, and power over the imagination of readers, and invention of an image of the writer. They're comparable on those terms. Didion wrote circles around Thompson, but Didion created "Didion" in the same way Thompson created "Thompson" (and Hemingway created "Hemingway"), and those creations have a life independent of the books. I read the article as an attempt to explain the phenomenon of "Didion".

If you restrict your attention to the writing alone -- which is the right thing to do I suppose -- then all that remains a complete mystery. And then you have to explain why Didion caught the public imagination more than Janet Frame, for example, who was a better writer still.

i mean caitlin flanagan is kind of mean-spirited

Well, maybe she is. I don't know, I've read only a few things by her. I can tell you this, though: if you grew up at that time, place and milieu, then the world will forever be letting you down.

that all seems otm (i've never read janet frame!) i meant to indicate my own investments in didion which i think reveal that it's kind of silly to talk about her appeal to women as uniform.

the only part that doesn't seem otm is this: if you grew up at that time, place and milieu, then the world will forever be letting you down. but maybe i just don't know what you mean.