Joan Didion

new Netflix doc on her by griffin dunne up tday

https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961

An essay on Didion:

And here I remember the manifold ways in which Didion’s image has been co-opted by our literary and cultural landscape, the tote bags, the Netflix documentary, the essay collection and even a writing contest at the University of California at Berkeley named after what is perhaps Didion’s most famous essay, “Goodbye to All That.” “Goodbye to All That” is a fine piece of writing, but to rest her reputation on this and The Year of Magical Thinking and two or three other selections from Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the first sentence of The White Album is, in a career as formidable and disruptive as Didion’s, not only to deflate her accomplishments but to cast her unwittingly into that most plaintive and immovable invisibility: the invisibility of the thinker whose ideas are hidden in plain sight.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ygpk64d9dwxn4hm/Joan%20Didion%20-%20A%20Travelogue.pdf?dl=0

What a shit year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/books/joan-didion-dead.html

She and Kael and Sontag are my three favorite writers of this or any other era imo.

Goodbye to all that.

It occurs to me that Sontag also passed late in December (the year escapes me now), after the year end “people we lost” remembrances had run.

2006 Paris Review interview

Didion was quite unusual as a writer in being more popular at the end of her life than ever before. Though partly I think the popularity was shallow, based on an idea of her, from people who had seen a programme about her but not read much.

That particular kind of appreciation goes rather well with a season of mourning and celebration - literally people online are writing 'goodbye you unique angel', an attitude that Didion herself never had. She was a highly unsentimental writer - but then, I, lamentably, have still not got round to reading her famous late memoirs, which might contradict me on that.

I wonder if people will now recall her remarkable polemic against feminism from, I think, the early 1970s. There is probably a genuinely interesting discussion to be had around it. Maybe she changed her mind.

It occurs to me that almost all good writers are in some degree, at some point, comic writers, but Didion's work betrays very little humour. I can't recall a single moment of great comedy. Compare Pauline Kael, let alone Nora Ephron or Lorrie Moore. Maybe the coolness of the prose militated against comedy, and maybe it sublimated the comic into something a bit different: unspoken, implied sarcasm.

Returning, in effect, to the first point: I think Didion's repute, the idea of Didion, is inseparable from her image -- from numerous, often repeated, specific photographs. Having her picture taken for Vogue with her Corvette Stingray in 1968 was one of her greatest artistic decisions. I don't mean, sarcastically, that she was 'just image', or 'style over substance'. Why not think the style was pretty substantial? It's not easy to look that good. Many of us never manage it. In this aspect of her management of her public identity, she actually resembles, of all people ... Samuel Beckett, a great poseur whose photographic likeness has for decades accompanied our sense of his work.

idk I laugh out loud when she dissects Reagan, Poppy Bush, Gingrich, etc.

Alfred otm, the pieces collected in Political Fictions are hilarious (in a very disillusioning way)

she’s very funny in her novels imo. think maybe sometimes ppl miss it bc of all the bad stuff happening

The humor is very dry and subtle.

I’m honestly relieved that her detractors either missed the news or have restrained themselves online so far.

(On Facebook anyway, I don’t know what’s being said on Twitter really.)

not really prepared to deal with hot joan didion takes in the next few weeks myself

no writer had a more profound impact on me, even though i know approx three billion writers, many of them bad, who would say the same thing. unparalleled on a sentence level, uniquely talented at bringing you into the quotidian dramas of a world you weren’t previously interested in (cf. her essay on water systems in the white album), maybe the only writer who fundamentally understood and could convey what it’s like to drive on a highway in california. for all that people think of her as this relentless, reflexive personal essayist i find all of the pleasure in her writing comes from describing very small experiences that people tend to only unconsciously register

The emphasis on the personal has baffled me the last 24 hours. Maybe b/c I came to her through the later work and didn't read her novels first?

I only really know her earlier work - and don't see it as especially personal.

yeah i think it’s a popular but shallow reading of her, or rather it’s all based on that one section of slouching towards bethlehem: why i write, goodbye to all that, etc.

I think 'Goodbye to All That' is just about the best thing by Joan Didion that I have ever read!

(Again: I still need to read tons of the late work.)

as has been stated several times itt, miami is the greatest

i was so annoyed when a few years ago they published a collection of shitty writers’ essays about leaving new york and actually called it “goodbye to all that”

Making my way through this old take on why Didion is not good and while I've never cared to dig deep enough this does scan to me.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html

so why didn't I remember what was surely a salient fact to Lucille Maxwell Miller if not to Ms. Didion? The reason -- and I ask you to understand that this is directly related to lavender pillows and matching lavender orchids -- is that Didion was not in truth engaged in reporting about Lucille Maxwell Miller; Didion was reporting on Didion's sensibility, which in this essay, as in all her essays, assumes more importance than, say, the existence of the electric chair. What happens in this essay is that Lucille Maxwell Miller is convicted -- by Didion - - of wearing polyester and Capris, of living in a house with a snack bar and a travertine entry, of speaking in cliches, of having a picture window and a family room and a husband nicknamed Cork, of frequenting the Kapu-Kai Restaurant-Bar and Coffee Shop, and of never having eaten an artichoke. Lucille Maxwell Miller's real sin -- a truly, as it turned out, mortal one -- was to live in a subdivision house in the San Bernardino Valley and to hope to find "the good life" there, instead of in Brentwood Park or Malibu. Unlike those heroines of Didion's novels, Lucille Maxwell Miller never floated camellias in silver bowls to stave off encroaching madness or corruption -- no such exquisite desperation for her; she found a "reasonable little dressmaker" instead. The crime for which Didion indicts Lucille Maxwell Miller is of being tacky -- of not, that is, being Didion. This, you see, is where the lavender pillows come in: the body of Lucille Maxwell Miller's husband -- burned black -- offends Didion less than the fact that Lucille Maxwell Miller wore hair curlers. It isn't Didion's sense of morality that has suffered a blow, it's her sense of style. . . . Which is why, although I have nothing in principle against pretty houses or lavender love seats, Ms. Didion's lyrical angst strikes me as transparently ersatz. What I mean to say is Didion writes about Lucille Maxwell Miller -- and her loyal baby sitter, and her friends, and her admittedly silly lover -- as if they were mutants. No; she writes as if her subject were the Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest.

No; in fact, her subject is always herself.

That strikes me as quite a misguided take.

Did Susan Sontag face this kind of thing in her time?

(I like what I’ve read of SS but haven’t read it all; for whatever reason it can be difficult for me to really embrace:)

All it gets right: Didion's limning of a sensibility, which...is not a flaw?

I find Sontag more ersatz than Didion these days, but I stress "more."

No Alfred.

I still read her with pleasure, the book reviews especially: it's "Against Interpretation" itself I find hard going these days; it slips through my fingers. Huge influence on me too.

Sontag was different in issuing virtual 'manifestos' -- against interpretation and camp.

She wasn't really a reporter, was she? More a thinker (illness as metaphor).

I see a strong generational comparison, but not sure that the two were working in the same genres of writing.

I will grant that Sontag wasn't particularly funny, but Didion was. She's an honorary Scandinavian midwesterner so far as I'm concerned.

xyz please stop updating the didion threads with bad writing about didion

Bad writing AND bad tweets Brad.

Didion may, indeed, have been funny.

Could anyone, then, perhaps post or quote something funny that she wrote?

When her husband died, she noted the paramedics referring to her as a "cool customer."

A fact that I quite like about Didion is that, at least in the late 1960s, she was open to the world of new pop music. I like it when in 'The White Album' she casually talks about popping out to watch the Flying Burrito Brothers. And of course in the same essay she writes of The Doors in a way that seems significantly perceptive and telling, in a way that was probably quite original (and possibly comic, a comedy arising directly from the material).

I was reflecting last night that being born in 34, she was, say, 22 when Elvis broke, 30 when The Beatles hit the USA - almost too old for it all, by the sensible standards of those days. That makes me the more impressed that she could, at times, engage with it. I've almost forgotten to mention that "The White Album" itself is a reference to an LP that was 11 years old when the book came out. It must be some kind of subtle play that the LP isn't actually called that, and the book really is.

Whether, in 1984, she was still interested enough to be writing about Pat Benatar, I'm more doubtful.

the essay the book is named for was written at exactly the time the LP came out

I'm away from home and all my books, hence my imprecision.

A look at that title essay online shows, on its first page, reference to a period that 'continued until 1971'.

https://www.reachcambridge.com/wp-content/uploads/Friday-5th-August-Afternoon-Session-Oversharing-Joan-Didion-The-White-Album.pdf

Thus it appears accurate to say that the essay is a retrospect on a period that lasted until 3 years after the LP came out.

And of course in the same essay she writes of The Doors in a way that seems significantly perceptive and telling, in a way that was probably quite original (and possibly comic, a comedy arising directly from the material).

otm

Accidentally waded into some strange Joan Didion chat pic.twitter.com/9qE3mRTEgu

— Gear Starmer (@mina_um_so) December 24, 2021

people always ignore or are rude about the novels which I always feel are the best things she did: hollow, circling and very very funny. I love the part in run river where the character keeps bleeding over the terrible summer clothes she tries to sew for her daughter. They are repetitive and artful and involve a very strange mishmash of elements: class, the security state, bottles of bourbon kept on nightstands. I think her greatest achievement as a writer is very much about style, about her image in an oblique way, a sense of how the 'meaning' events have feels to be always coalescing but ultimately elusive (a series of fragments, she is very good on the arbitrariness of the image that becomes fixed in our minds, the shallowness of history, nancy reagan's rose bushes). I feel like she's very good at unpicking how ideas in 'the culture' swirl around ideals of glamour and power but i'm sometimes troubled by how infatuated she seems to be by those ideals herself. i think the stuff about the hippies and john wayne is cheap and reactionary, the later stuff is better. I think the book about her daughter dying is weirdly and brutally impersonal. I thought the Celine ad was boring. I thought the thing about the central park runner was evasive and superior. I think her 'perceptiveness' is very guarded and she could be very good at not saying anything at all. interviews with her are often a hoot for exactly this reason. she always makes malibu sound so fabulous and then you think -'im p sure she's talking about living in a gated community'

thank you, that gets at a lot of what i don't like about her writing in a charitable way. tho i didn't get the humor in play it as it lays at all, and i found it really unpleasant.

I feel like she's very good at unpicking how ideas in 'the culture' swirl around ideals of glamour and power but i'm sometimes troubled by how infatuated she seems to be by those ideals herself.

i think this is fundamentally who she was as an artist, and having lived all of my adult life on the verge of being broke, i tire of coolly detached commentary on the ruling class. there's not very much nutrition in that.

The fascination with the quiddities of the ruling class dissolve in the later essays. She couldn't have written about George Will, Cokie Roberts, and Newt Gingrich's ancestors in the 1960s with such attention to their argot.

I think the book about her daughter dying is weirdly and brutally impersonal.

I almost agree with you, which is to say, this is a sharp way of describing a response I don't share. "Brutally" is where I stumble. Her exteriorizing of grief strikes me as un-American; we're obsessed with "closure" when she describes a, well, brutal and endless feedback loop of grief exteriorized and dissected.

having lived all of my adult life on the verge of being broke, i tire of coolly detached commentary on the ruling class. there's not very much nutrition in that.

― Nedlene Grendel as Basenji Holmo (map), Friday, 24 December 2021 19:02 (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

having etc similarly i still like to snack!

The novels have never fully worked for me - there’s a hermetic feeling there - but they have moments. The essays and non-fiction work is where things open up.

I suppose that I don’t necessarily need a writer to speak to my personal/social/financial circumstances to enjoy that writer. What matters: am I spellbound, intrigued, made curious? Am I compelled to experience art or visit a place because of how that writer frames it?

(I can’t imagine embracing an explicitly racist or anti-Semitic or otherwise misogynistic writer, or course. That would be repellent in an unforgivable way. Joan Didion was not these things.

Do I think it would’ve been fun to hang out with Didion for an hour? No. If offered I may have just declined. But I don’t need to want to hang out with my favorite creative people.)

Her exteriorizing of grief strikes me as un-American; we're obsessed with "closure" when she describes a, well, brutal and endless feedback loop of grief exteriorized and dissected.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 24 December 2021 19:20 (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i meant more that its oddly impersonal about her daughter who is very much missing from the story. You learn so little about her. Large themes in her life only darkly hinted at. But I think the idea that Americans do not exteriorise and obsess on their own inward lives is not the impression you all give to the world at large.

I’m rambling on here but Joan Didion (and a lot of other authors from that mid-late 20th century era) offer a sense of literary time travel. If you’re interested in how some adults in that era lived and thought and acted, this is a social window into a world that we might only understand through generalized history, or statistics, etc. Yes, the dead past.

It's been many years since I read it, but Year wasn't entombed in its narcissism like so much self-help and ten-steps-to-happiness guides with which Americans are obsessed. Circling around the subject -- her daughter -- is damn effective in the same way that drawing circles around a letter grade makes it stand out.

i don’t remember blue nights well enough to argue effectively in its favor but like… we are mysteries to each other