Joan Didion

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

Blue Nights may be the toughest read. It’s been a while for me but I remember it more as a memoir about aging towards the end.

All I remember are the references to fried chicken.

some writers have this tone and rhythm that's intoxicating, whenever I read her I would find myself thinking sentences that were derivative of her

I get that way with some rappers, MF DOOM or Sean Price or Migos, there's something addictive about the cadence that gets stuck in my head

so I dunno I'll let the better read people hash our what it all meant but she had a Distinctive Thing, which how many people who write ever have?

whether or not she was a good person or w/e that cool detached style and how observational she was was something that I was happy to visit on occasion

That strikes me as quite a misguided take.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, December 24

OTM... though it does say a lot about the taker. I read the whole thing and her commitment to the bit is impressive.

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.

― the pinefox, Friday, December 24, 2021

the canonization of a writer's writer in the Instagram era has always been... weird. but there are legit possibly more people now who know her as the Smart Grief Lady than remaining cargo cultists wearing through their third copy of The White Album.

corollary: on today's evidence via social, Didion UC Riverside 1975 is the new DFW Kenyon 2005

Lots of funnies here.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/23/joan-didion-in-her-own-words-23-of-the-best-quotes

there's that UC Riverside

“the grave’s a fine and lovely place, but none I think do there embrace”
- Joan Didion

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”

Also the title of a fine memoir of WWI by Robert Graves.

a fine memoir of WWI by Robert Graves which I've read twice and is sitting on my shelf right now.

joan didion fucking ruled, i’m sorry: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/10/11/theyll-take-manhattan-3/

but why him? why not pick on someone her own size? (what about him provoked her?) secrets of the dead ... (why I fear losing my mother)

Various people have linked to, quoted or cited this essay: 'Joan Didion: Only Disconnect' by Barbara Grizzutti Harrison. I have only just read it. My sense is that it was really a review of THE WHITE ALBUM, which also (LRB-style) took in the rest of the oeuvre to that point.

As such, it does *not* reliably stand as a commentary on Didion's work *after* 1979 - some of which might be a quite different matter.

As a commentary on Didion's work *up to* 1979, I think it's harsh, sometimes off-target, sometimes tonally misguided -- yet also partially accurate; suggestive; perceptive.

I think Harrison is right to suspect that Didion, in this work, isn't such a great stylist. More importantly, I think she's right to say that Didion's emphasis is repeatedly 'conservative' in being disdainful about anything leftist, progressive or inclined to collective action to improve the world. This attitude is very recognisable across conservative writing. As Twitter poster Elvis Bunuelo (whose tweet encouraged me to read the essay) commented: Didion was an interesting reactionary writer, especially interesting because people rarely pointed out that she was reactionary. Perhaps that's overstatement. I still think the later Didion might be significantly different from the earlier. But _as a statement about the earlier work_, I think it's partially accurate.

So, I don't wholly buy Harrison's critique, but it also contains far too much accurate material to be merely dismissed.

It remains the case that one of the best things ever written on Didion was by Martin Amis. But Amis's repute is now so bad that people, perhaps understandably, won't be keen to believe that.

the title essay in slouching towards bethlehem has always been my least favorite part of it

the white album seems more tuned to ‘70s apocalyptic dread than any particularly reactionary philosophy but i am relying on memory here

surely not giving a woody allen stan the satisfaction of a detailed reply is not joan didion bullying a reader

i've seen a lot of people assert that didion was reactionary, not just in her skepticism toward leftists but in general. but i don't really see much evidence of that in her work. it's certainly odd and upsetting that she not only voted for goldwater but seems to have continued to admire him; she mentions that in the introduction to political fictions. but it also seems like a weird anomaly in her life: nothing in any of those later political essays strikes me as being written from a conservative perspective, quite the opposite really. and yeah, she wrote for national review in the early 60s, but so did garry wills. i don't think liking john wayne movies necessarily means much. (i like a few of them myself.) that said, i can also completely understand why ppl would be put off by the goldwater thing. i read an interview with renata adler once where she was gushing about her friendship with henry kissinger and i've always been a little put off reading her work by that.

srsly where's the evidence she was conservative or even wrote as a disaffected or disillusioned conservative? She doesn't much like Bill Clinton, but she limits the contempt to a paragraph in Political Fictions in an essay perfectly limning what Tim Russert's Washington DC lookd lik.

My own sense that Didion was, in some ways, at some times, somewhat conservative -- has nothing to do with John Wayne (whom I love), nor Bill Clinton, not even Barry Goldwater (though that does sound very relevant).

Rather, it's about the conservative tendency in her earlier writing (ie: mainly in STB and TWA) which is, as I suggested just above, sceptical of progress, social change, ideals, radicalism, you name it. Her attack on feminism is one, extreme example of this, but even if you took that away as an anomaly, the mood would inhere. Barbara Harrison cites case after case of it. What Harrison helped me to remember is how Didion tends to displace and dismiss political projects and progressive goals in favour or personal or private life, or sheer contingency that can't (as radicals would like) be planned or improved, or existential void -- and so on.

These claims risk becoming general and thus unsustainable, but as I say, Harrison cites numerous specific examples, and it does recall my own experience of reading that period of Didion.

However, I also sense that the later political journalism (which people here have mentioned several times) is rather different. I wonder if one would really need to say that there were different eras of Didion, and it wasn't all just one thing.