Joan Didion

yeah they're great (like everything else she's involved with)

i started play it as it lays a few years ago and didn't know how iago was, so gave up disheartened on line two. probably ready for a rerun.

- didn't know who iago was -

I do like her essay 'goodbye to all that'
and Blue Magic or Blue Nights are pretty good titles
maybe she'd at least be better on ageing than Amis (M)
or then again, even, maybe not!

It's not Didion book related, but I'm loving this:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/aug/16/letter-from-manhattan/

Didion's takedown of Woody Allen, after he went serious in the 70s.

i love her dearly and am a bit disheartened by the pinefox's indifference! just reread all of slouching towards bethlehem and read play it as it lays in the last month. i keep meaning to start the white album but i almost don't want to run out of vintage didion so quickly so i'm putting it off.

i think there's a lot more emotion in her writing than people assume -- that hatchet job linked to upthread makes no sense at all to me. i've never gotten the sense that didion's laconic style was meant to signify condescension toward her subjects. that essay on self-esteem is one of the most succinct and powerful essays i've ever read.

the only other thing i've read is political fictions, which is great and all but hasn't stuck with me like the earlier stuff (except for the review of newt gingrich's book, so hilarious mean it's almost hard to get through).

- didn't know who iago was -

That's ok. He is among the most impenetrable of Shakespeare's characters.

It's not Didion book related, but I'm loving this:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/aug/16/letter-from-manhattan/

Didion's takedown of Woody Allen, after he went serious in the 70s.

― Romeo Jones, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 7:09 PM Bookmark

This is great and unfair at the same time. If it were written by anyone less than Joan Didion it wouldn't work. Yes, Woody Allen films have a certain quality of being stuck in a hyper-precocious adolescence at times, but that's also part of their charm, and I don't buy that she's uncharmed by them. Besides, I think it's a little disingenuous for a professional serious essayist to criticize someone for pondering meaning. I mean most people go to offices every day and do work they don't even like -- they stopped sitting in cafes with notebooks a long time ago.

I get the feeling "I'm too mature for this" has been her posture for a lot of her life -- though it's exactly that posture that makes Slouching Toward Bethlehem so sharp.

Didion's political writing -- Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions -- was immensely influential on me.

As a novelist, though, she gives the impression that she hasn't read a new one since college.

JD, I don't think my feeling is indifference - more repeated disappointment. I think I've written this up so many times over the years, on this board, that I probably shouldn't go over it again. But to recap, I think she's been lucky in her admirers (including, maybe, you!); I think she radiates a kind of glamour and cool; I think she writes about interesting subjects sometimes; she always seems like someone that one would be interested in and want to read.

But I also think, in practice, that her level of actual insight isn't often that high; her prose is unadventurous, a mannerism that stops her needing to try things, find words, take risks; and yes I think 'condescension' / superiority / 'I'm too mature for this' is far too much a default setting in her writing. Also I've read 2-3 novels and they really weren't worth much more than a dime - I couldn't see why she persevered with them.

And yet, I still think of her as a writer that I like.

(I only say all this again cos the admirable JD prompted it)

thinking about the prose again: how many great phrases, striking bundles of words, do you come across in reading Didion? can anyone remember any? I think perhaps she has little lyric sense; there isn't much semantic bounty or verbal music; she's the opposite of a Pynchon (whom I also frequently find exasperating for other reasons); and writing in her sort of plain style has been a way of legitimating this - or has sealed it, encouraged it to happen, put her unseen lyric gift to sleep.

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

Did you ever find that?

I've been reading her Paris Review interview to celebrate Pancake Day. She says certain things with a very impressive all-American coolness. But she also says things that aren't very impressive.

She says that when she's writing a novel, she starts the day by retyping the whole thing from p.1, or p.20 or so. That makes it seem the more remarkable that her novels don't seem to include any good writing - unless it was all excised by the endless rewriting.

Her interviewer crawlingly says that DH Lawrence 'didn't know anything about women at all'. Didion says: 'No, nothing'.

Now, I don't like Lawrence. In some ways he is among my least favourite writers. But he was a human being in the C20 who was married to a woman and travelled the world with her; who had intense relations with his mother and perhaps other women. He wrote a lot about women (and men). Is it plausible to say of such a person that he 'didn't know anything about women at all'? What kind of discriminate literary judgement is this? You might as well say I don't know anything about books at all, even though I've lived around them all my life.

Of course, the duller truth is that women are different from one another. You can know one woman, and not know another. You can know some things and not others. That was probably the case with DHL.

My contribution for International Women's Pancake Day.

You might as well say I don't know anything about books at all, even though I've lived around them all my life.

maybe you don't!

i don't know; it seems a fairly standard hyperbolic statement. we could translate it as "d.h. lawrence's work takes a great interest in the relations between the sexes, but that interest, which qualified him as a remarkable writer on the subject to his contemporaries, makes him seem all the more egregious on the subject today; and it's fair to say that he seems entirely wrong-headed on the subject of women."

or we could accept the shorthand in its cattiness; it's not really joan didion's job, or anyone's -- unless, say, they're a lawrence scholar, or writing a survey of twentieth-century fiction -- to be immediately responsible to have developed opinions about d.h. lawrence ready and to hand.

well, I think it is true that most of us are ignorant in lots of ways about physical objects and processes (including eg books). This is a condition of which I always feel fairly aware.

But again, there are lots of things to know about books, levels of knowing. There are some things that I know about some books. It wouldn't be plausible to say I don't know anything about any books.

I think your paraphrase is very convincing, and much more sophisticated and interesting than Didion's / interviewer's statement (because you posit a connection between DHL's strong interest and his possible errors) -- until the last clause. I don't know whether we can assume that he seems entirely wrong-headed on this subject. We'd probably need to work a bit to remind ourselves exactly what he did think or say.

Again, I feel a bit doubtful that there is a 'subject of women' - that idea seems like part of the problem. But, maybe DHL did believe in it, and maybe that could be one way that he was wrong.

It wouldn't really have struck me much (these interviews are full of daft put-downs etc) - but she just doesn't come across very well in the interview as a whole. I always feel that Didion thinks she's a much better writer than she is - a strange effect.

But there is a fine sentence or two about sunsets on the West Coast which exemplify her American authority.

that's probably a pretty canny thing to say, and a good point from which to start investigating the subject of 'lawrence and women', if we choose to, if we're in some place to do so.

on the other hand, i don't really see that a passing topic (books didion wrote on as an undergraduate!) in an interview about writing nonfiction is a place where said subject really needs to be investigated: it seems a ridiculous level of precision to demand of anyone, that anything said about anything needs to hew that true to reasonable statement, to accuracy of expression. i'd probably have to give up on ever talking about books again, if that were the case.

(xpost)

barthelme put 'all the paris review interviews' on a list of things his students should study. i feel like they belong on a list of things no one that wants to write should ever, ever read, almost.

Didion is one of my favorite journalists and stylists, but I've long suspected she hasn't read a novel since the sixties.

This is what Didion said that made a bit of an impression on me.

"There's always something missing about late afternoon to me on the East Coast. Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. Here it just gets dark."

A positive thing to do with Didion would be just to quote lines she's written that one thinks are good.

Great quote. The Year of Magical Thinking is a wonderful place to start. The deep seriousness actually goes with gusts of adventure, even fun, occasionally.Especially when she dreams about swimming with her daughter, or (apparently in the real-life waking world)exasperates a doctor with her self-taught sense of medical author-a-tah (as South Park's Cartman would put it). She's getting out of the house!

Although gravity (with those gusts) might be a more accurate description than "deep seriousness."

her novels don't seem to include any good writing

off-sides!

Didion is one of my favorite journalists and stylists, but I've long suspected she hasn't read a novel since the sixties.

I think her position is "if I've already got Henry James and Joseph Conrad what do I need with other authors"

my gf takes that line. it's kind of infuriating but also kind of impossible to argue with

A positive thing to do with Didion would be just to quote lines she's written that one thinks are good.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, March 8, 2011 11:37 AM Bookmark

"I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition, but one I found troubling." (The White Album)

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."
(Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

seems like that one is the standard go-to quotation for Didion, but it's still so great.

yeah that would be mine, too

I don't especially remember it. Surely the go-to qns (ie the most famous) would be

'we tell ourselves stories in order to live'

and the first para or so of the 'slouching towards B' essay which really is striking, even to a sceptic like me.

I like bits of 'on the morning after the sixties' and 'goodbye to all that' also.

I find her most interesting in chunks. I mean, I know that's exactly what the publishers have always been shooting for -- but 'The White Album', e.g., does gain a lot of interest from being 'Didion does the 70s'. I think, too, that read with some mind to the fact of her mental state the thoughts, sentiments, expressed therein make more sense to a reader than if one tries to consider them the feelings of a vast, dispassionate brain -- I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that, now, having written it.

I'm not sure I don't get more out of John McPhee or Ellen Willis, say, as guides to the culture. But Didion's stuff maybe has more to do with the interplay of 'trying to be a guide to the culture' and 'trying to maintain your own individual psyche'.

curious about what you meant aactually by "feelings of a vast dispassionate brain".
Some of the more topical stuff can be so so, but I have a place in my heart for her languid writing on hotels in Hawaii or growing flowers in Malibu

The great strength of her later nonfiction is her iron stomach & unblinking gaze when she uses quotations - I attribute this to her lifelong admiration of Hemingway, her desire for the words to do 100% of the work when possible. From "God's Country," about Bush, which ran during the 2000 election:

This was a man who, when the Texas economy went belly-up in the mid-1980s, joined a group of Midland businessmen who met once a week under the guidance of a national group called Community Bible Study, the class format of which includes the twelve-step technique of personal testimony, in this case "seeing the truths of the Bible lived out in the lives of leaders and class members." The participants in Bush's class were "baby boomers, men with young families," a former member told Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post. "And we suddenly found ourselves in free fall. So we began to search for an explanation. Maybe we had been too involved with money. Maybe we needed to look inwardly and find new meaning in life."

She is quite good at that, I agree - but doesn't it largely rely on the daftness and inaptness of the things the stupid or wicked people say?

but her juxtapositions are done with perfect timing

btw her Reagan essay "In the Court of the Fisher King" is LOL funny.

She is quite good at that, I agree - but doesn't it largely rely on the daftness and inaptness of the things the stupid or wicked people say?

Sure but it's the way she frames it - her skill for decorating the frame within which the pre-existing horror will be displayed is remarkable. "the class format of which includes the twelve-step technique of personal testimony, in this case " and then the quote: it's like she's knotted the most economical noose. She also has (and whether this is a virtue or not depends on your outlook) a gift for the very subtle sneer - I can't say just how "the class format of which includes the twelve-step technique of personal testimony, in this case" manages to convey ridicule/disbelief, but it does

As I've said before (probably way upthread several times, years ago), I have often found a weakness of her writing to be the unsubtlety of the sneers (albeit done in this blank-looking style).

But that would be mainly in relation to the earlier work, I think. If she uses her time and ability to attack very nasty right-wing US politicians - something she seems to have done much more of in the last 2 decades or so - then that's fine by me, really.

She attacks lots of Democrats too: I remember one devastating paragraph about Bill Clinton in her (masterful) essay on the impeachment.

I've never understood what's so special about joan didion

like whenever I read her work I'm like ok this is alright what else

We've just two days explaining it!

I will now scroll up

But that would be mainly in relation to the earlier work, I think. If she uses her time and ability to attack very nasty right-wing US politicians - something she seems to have done much more of in the last 2 decades or so - then that's fine by me, really.

You might read "Political Fictions," a collection of her political essays. It does include her attacks on right-wing politicians, including Bill Clinton.

^^^ you beat me to that crack

not trying to troll here but when the pinefox said that her prose was unadventurous, yeah, I agree with that, that's probably the biggest stumbling block in me getting into her work, that's just my thing though, like, I look at it, and just think, yeah ok this is pretty american, these are some thoughts some people have

love this:

these are some thoughts some people have

just so we have our parameters defined, whose prose is "adventurous," and how?

^ im wonderin

I'd read an interview of Bret Easton Ellis where he sings Joan Didion's praises, and so I read a few passages, and I was a little shocked at how much he just wholesale appropriated her style, and why not? It's a pretty effective style. People should steal it more often.

Yes, terrific podcast.

really excellent discussion, thanks for sharing

patricia lockwood makes an excellent case for her in the introductory essay to this book, and i think, pretty objectively, joan didion gave great interviews, so it's prob worth buying: https://bookshop.org/books/joan-didion-the-last-interview-and-other-conversations/9781685890117

Where I Was From is notes from her lifelong trek through legacies of illusion, coming to grips with the Californias of heroic individualism and artificial paradise of water and land politics,the white pioneer destiny, fed to the childhood heads of her generation and so many before, some since: familiar enough in sum, but she fills in the details of her experience and others', from ancestors barely avoiding the fate of the Donner Party, to delusions of some Jack London characters and her own, in River Run, also the real-life citizens of Lakewood, shining suburban island tied to military contracts during the Cold War and after or "after," lots of other people and ties: the rhythmic development of all this is amazing (and "was" from is right, right as she can make it, with no desire to break with the people, places, and things she's loved, though memory is most of that now---prob no illusion of breaking entirely with the other stuff, the mad insidious bullshit, but she seems to be sitting there waiting at the end, having gotten this far.)

I finished LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN: a 2021 collection of essays. Information about the essays is poor: the book should have a simple list indicating the provenance and context of each, but only has a date after each.

The Foreword by Hilton Als (who?) is bad.

The first 6 are short essays from 1968. They may be the best material in the book. They don't outstay a welcome. Didion is at a certain kind of peak here - in the simple sense that she was a "great documenter of 1968 CA", or whatever.

"Why I Write" is a 1976 talk on her writing and imaginative process. "Telling Stories" is a 1978 recollection of writing short stories in the 1950s and 1960s, and notes that has written none since and doesn't feel comfortable with the form.

"Some Women" (1989) starts off about photographic studios and models in general, then turns into an essay about photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Possibly this would be explained if we had the context, eg: maybe this was really always presented as an essay about Mapplethorpe.

"The Long-Distance Runner" is about director Tony Richardson. It appears to be the foreword to a posthumous memoir by him. It's quite interesting to learn that Didion and her family were so close to Richardson, who was making films way back before she was known as a writer.

"Last Words" is a longer essay about Ernest Hemingway, on the occasion of the publication of a posthumous work. It contains elements of appreciation and even of "close reading", and may be somewhat significant in clarifying her adherence to, admiration for, Hemingway, in style and narrative outlook. She then spends much time criticising people for publishing writing (including letters) that Hemingway didn't choose to publish.

"Everywoman.com" (2000) is a very of-its-time, late-90s / dot com sort of era, article about Martha Stewart - a very successful businesswoman who I believe has been very popular in the US but has never made such a dent in the awareness of my own country. Didion spends time rather needlessly arguing with others for their complaints about Stewart, as a way to get her own contrary view forward. The view is rather simple: people (women) like Stewart because she is a successful businesswoman and they'd like to be like that. The materials of this essay - lots of corporate-speak - do not make for a good text when transposed into Didion's typically inclusive rendition, ie: one in which she repeats corporate phrases and titles as fully and repetitively as possible, as though to laconic effect.

Didion writes with the plainness, and / or carefulness, that we expect from her. I quickly come to realise, again, that one of her typical effects is to report what people say, within this flat style, and thus make them look silly or vainglorious. I ask myself why this effect is achieved and I think: well, it's a bit like letting them speak, then, rather than responding, applauding or reflecting, just leaving silence, and thus making them appear to "fall flat". This, roughly, seems to me one of the characteristic strategies of her whole career.

She also occasionally goes in for the notes of faux-naiveté or lyricism that others have found in her writing. That woman, quoted upthread here, who trashed Didion in about 1979 was good at seeing how repetitive her style was, not just in its flatness but in the particular tactics that she used to relieve the flatness. One that I don't like is her, I think the word is, paratactic style, when she says "and ... and ... and", as though this is a canny literary effect, or as though it conveys being, as an ilxor once said, "overcome by unexpected emotion". I find it rather adolescent, and certainly mannered. The sentences from Hemingway that she quotes admiringly are precisely like this, so she is fairly open, implicitly, about having taken this stylistic idea from an admired precursor. I don't think it's great in Hemingway either.

Didion has a mystique of writing. She talks quite preciously or pretentiously about the experience of writing, the task of the writer, the nature of writing, and so on. One of her claims is that writing is always aggressive (p.44), which is only plausible or true at such a level of abstraction or generality that it has little purchase. It might be more productive to consider how Joan Didion's style, specifically, is sometimes aggressive, while tending to dissemble this.

When I mention a mystique of writing, the best antidote to it that I can think of it might be a long-ago LRB review by Ian Sansom, basically saying that writers like to go on about how hard writing is but actually it's easy compared to other kinds of work. Perhaps a partial truth, but just as useful as Didion's. That review is here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n23/ian-sansom/whamming

In these remarks I have tended to focus on the annoying and poor aspects of Didion's writing, but it may be fair to say that first half-dozen essays, which are quite brisk and do report on actual things, have more worth than that.

Hilton Als (who?)

oh he put out one of the best essay collections i’ve ever read a few years ago, called white girls. pretty regular new yorker contributor

Yeah, was gonna say that. Haven't read his intro or anything else in the collection, but The Year of Magical Thinking and Where I Was From, which I mentioned upthread, are contributions to world literature, though cost her almost almost all her writing and other life, a lot of loss and endeavor to get there.
Seems fitting, since WIWF is from the California Children of the Pioneers mythos, very gradually seeing all through that, closer and closer to home.

Thirding White Girls

I know it's late but you can read that WA piece - and a lot of the older NYRB articles in general - by putting the URL in the Internet Archive and going to the earlier incarnations. It's actually quite short by NYRB standards.

Didion writes with the plainness, and / or carefulness, that we expect from her. I quickly come to realise, again, that one of her typical effects is to report what people say, within this flat style, and thus make them look silly or vainglorious. I ask myself why this effect is achieved and I think: well, it's a bit like letting them speak, then, rather than responding, applauding or reflecting, just leaving silence, and thus making them appear to "fall flat". This, roughly, seems to me one of the characteristic strategies of her whole career.

This is a great observation! Something that's annoyed me that I haven't seen put into words before. Didion's not the only writer who does this. And obviously it's a staple of reality show editing.

What annoys you about it? Curious.

Thanks, poster Chuck Tatum. I had to think a bit before I could articulate this small observation.

xpost

Perhaps it's the unprocessed need for the writer to seem smarter than the people they're observing. I guess there's a line between allowing someone the space to damn themselves (which is fine) and unfairly making someone seem like a phoney (which might say more about the author than the subject).

Imagine someone (not) reacting to you like that in real life and it’s clear why it’s annoying.

the style referred to entered journalism (or anyway this is my under-informed guess) via the younger new yorker style-switch from a youthful over-admiration of henry james to the golden-bowl guilt phase of absorbing imitating and parodying hemingway and his mentor gertrude stein: whose combined shtick was (a) less is more, let the subtext sing in the air stripped of any DO-YOU-SEE-style announcement* plus in particular stein's penchant for repetition as a device for variation of mode

*where "not saying it" is a mark of shared sensibility: we needn't comment-explain bcz we all already get it (which narrowing of the "we" -- as chuck above suggests -- is actually kind of a betrayal of journalism i guess, certainly a super-complex ethical-aesthetical line that the NYer created and then made its early home in )

yes i am meant to be cleaning my kitchen floor and not at all on this thread, yell at me next time i post plz

"less is more" = leaving out the (b) = stein's use of repetition as a forensic device

I'm relieved to see that I broadly agree with Mark S, though without knowing enough about New Yorker magazine history.

I like his reference to a "betrayal of journalism".

Perhaps it's the unprocessed need for the writer to seem smarter than the people they're observing. I guess there's a line between allowing someone the space to damn themselves (which is fine) and unfairly making someone seem like a phoney (which might say more about the author than the subject).

― Chuck_Tatum

This is true, but this approach starts to ebb around the 1980s. It's why I admire Miami and the later work over the more famous early stuff.

I think it's important for the writer of features and reviews to know when to let the quote have some space around it, for the reader to fill, having established context. The writer also has to be choosy about quotes, not just pick the best or worst lines, but also not just stringing a lot of lines together, beyond just enough of the latter to give the idea, if that's what the artiste mainly does. I've had some hard times with that kind of writing, but it's worth doing, I think--of course some readers, incl. some editors want every damn thing spelled out. I even had one editor who told me to "spoonfeed," in so many words. I don't go around that joint no more.

As a reader, I find it offputting to have the writer jumping in there to explain everything, unless I'm reading an instruction manual or dispatch from a country/situation I've barely heard of etc.

I'm not talking about leaving space in "hard journalism," that is. The harder it is the more I want to be told about it.

anticipation: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/arts/design/joan-didion-hammer-museum-hilton-als.html

Who cares if she staged the photo in the article for a Williams Sonoma photo op? She tried to write.

betrayal of journalism my ass---in all the things I've read, some of her later writing, she provided the context, and so do the better New Yorker writers, rather jump in there with commentary, lecture points, that Gopnik Thurman etc "polymath" ponderosa

She did warn people not to forget she's in the room (as they tended to because she was so small and quiet, she said), because she's there to getcha (that was earlier though, I may never get back that far)

LOA wrapping up the trilogy this fall:

https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/9781598537871-185x300.jpg

I am excited to read the stage version of Magical Thinking