Joan Didion

Horseshoe: I agree that Didion seems scrupulous - esp. compared to some clearly over-self-obsessed people. But I'm not sure she *is* that scrupulous. The point about getting into people's heads - well, interesting. Yes, in a way the externality probably contributes to the sense of disdain. But that tactic is defensible. The real problem, maybe, is a bit different: her way of delivering sour pay-offs and implicit put-downs, and of setting people up. I don't think she does just report neutrally and accurately - which is the impression the prose gives at one level. I think she arranges things so that other people seem foolish; and as I said earlier, after a while this doesn't seem so impressive on her part.

Distant but at least topical comparison: Borat - taking c.2 hours of footage and showing 30 seconds to make passer-by / real person look sillier than they really did.

I was not saying that Didion was derivative of Thomson - he comes after her and reveres her. Just that once you've read him, her take on movies doesn't seem so great. Though I don't mean 'In Hollywood', which is kind of interesting - though also sneering and nasty.

Once again: I quite agree that Amis *in general* is annoying - the point is about this particular essay, and the valid or at least interesting things he has to say in it.

-- the pinefox (the pinefox), Tuesday, 14 November 2006 15:41 (11 months ago) Link

That essay on her IS nasty! But nice (for thread purposes) the way it connects her with Salinger, in the first para!

-- the pinefox (the pinefox), Tuesday, 14 November 2006 15:45 (11 months ago) Link

Actually, can someone write that Didion-as-Borat sketch? I see great comic possibility, but not the time to do it. I'll expect it on this thread by c.9 tomorrow morning.

PS / I have to countenance the possibility that LATE Didion - much admired, Indian summer, crowning moments of career etc - might be better than early.

-- the pinefox (the pinefox), Tuesday, 14 November 2006 16:15 (11 months ago) Link

it does seem that you might like late didion better, pinefox!

-- horseshoe (horseshoe), Tuesday, 14 November 2006 16:47 (11 months ago) Link

I not like "Magic Think Year" so much like "Bethelehem Slouch" or "White Book".

-- PJ Miller (PJ Miller 68), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 14:03 (11 months ago) Link

how are people with 'political fictions' and 'miami' and the sept 11th pamphlet?

-- tom west (thomp), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 17:01 (11 months ago) Link

I started reading the 9/11 pamphlet at Accentmonkey's house, and my response was infuriation at its unbelievable political naivete. (As in: 'a few weeks after 9/11, I started to feel disturbed.... Something about the atmosphere of feverish patriotism just wasn't quite right.... I wondered if there were things the government wasn't telling us....') It might have been faux-naivete, but that didn't seem to work too well either.

Thomson adores Democracy.

I have Where I Was From on a shelf at home. I have heard good things about it, which may be better than reading it. I have found it difficult to bring myself to read about Didion's ancestors. I like the cover, though. It is nicely designed and she looks good on it.

-- the pinefox (the pinefox), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 17:23 (11 months ago) Link

It is nicely designed and she looks good on it.

This is her appeal in a nutshell.

-- PJ Miller (PJ Miller 68), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 17:48 (11 months ago) Link

You are being too sarcastic, PJ. Whether you (or I) derive much pleasure or insight from Ms. Didion, no one can make a long writing career by connecting to readers only through their book designs and author's mug shots. Someone is reading her with real appreciation. You can argue that it is misplaced, but not that it doesn't exist.

-- Aimless (Aimless), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 18:31 (11 months ago) Link

I know that was self-indulgent of me, but partly I want to lure the pinefox back, because I love Didion, but his criticisms of her were good and provocative. Anyway, I don't expect people to necessarily respond to or even read all of that, but I thought it would be nice to have an ILB Didion thread.

We do miss Mr. P. Fox.

He was a fine pox, that pinefox.

I can't believe I was so hard on poor old Joan.

My fundamental reaction to the thought of her, to the sight of her books, to her name in the press, is, always, positive - as in fact I repeatedly say above. It's just that the books themselves didn't quite seem to measure up to that. But as I also repeatedly say (do I ever do anything but repeat my own repetitions?), she has been fortunate in her admirers.

hi pinefox!

i thought Play it as it lays was rather good, but i've not read any of her other novels

bump

i have zero interest in her fiction but everything else is great. agree with the pinefox that her bit on the diamond lanes is one of the few places where her slip shows. disagree with the pinefox on "The Women's Movement." boo hoo hoo it's "reactionary" -- it's also quite OTM in some uncomfortable ways.

the barbara grizzuti harrison piece might seem more "mean" if it weren't so just simply obtuse. hate to speak ill of the dead but jeez, sorry JD doesn't write about class the way you want her to but IT'S PRACTICALLY ALL SHE WRITES ABOUT so wtf do you want from her?

also goddamn right she uses style as argument. this is not a revelation THIS IS THE GODDAMN POINT.

anyhoo, possibly Our Finest Living Writer imo so.

Her disinterest in literature is a problem, but as a journalist she's about the best we have.

lol i love how i started this thread basically to stalk the pinefox. where u been, man?

Our Finest Living Writer

otm

finest novelist too, she is without peer

You are allowed to say that, because she is a very good writer with an excellent prose style. Luckily, you are not allowed to be entirely right. Such matters are never decided, even a century after the fact.

srsly though can anyone explain to me what's "convincing" about the BGH piece other than the deliberate misreading/professional jealousy aspect?

this is apropos of nothing but something else on ilx just reminded me of it. i remember, a couple of years after reading the white album, remembering the essay about aspiring starlet dallas beardsley, who had an appetite for stardom at the time of didion's piece, was poised to break into hollywood any way she could. with the benefit of thirty five years having elapsed between writing and reading, i was able to look her up and see whether she made it in the movies: imdb. it seems like a kinda poetic extra supplement to the story.

'style as argument'? But does Didion have a good style? Yes and no.

Her style is very controlled and it achieves passion only in moments where it designedly and dispassionately takes control of the passions of the reader. This is an interesting trick that she does rather well, although you needs must be susceptible to her approach for it to work as she intends.

As for whether this is "good style" I would say yes, but, for me, good style is any style that embodies the intentions of the author and connects with the intended audience. For example, Dr. Suess has an excellent style. What would be a good style for a non-fiction author is almost certain to be an ill-style for a gothic-horror author.

she has a new memoir coming out next year - blue magic, i think, about aging (will just defer to the blurb on the back to see how a didion book spells ageing) - and an article about it linked to goodbye to all that from slouching toward bethlehem, which i haven't read for ages. i am not a writer so this isn't from the position of being envious of her craft, but man, reading her is just such a rich experience; she triggers the pangs you ordinarily get of wistfulness or regret but without the character of those, squaring some event in the context of her age, of who she was, making whatever you're reading about totally subject to all of these other influences

oh man great news! I would give almost anything for another novel but I think The Last Thing He Wanted is probably gonna be it for Didion's novels.

oh it's blue nights, though - dang - was already pumped for blue magic

Awesome.

joan didion takes on miles' blue moods. my mistake.

the last thing i heard - which might've been c/o the site linked above - was that she was writing notes or something for a hbo biopic on katherine graham. which i'd love to see. but yeah pretty jazzed. i think she probably has a fair amount of newish uncollected writing sitting around, also - i saw her read prepared remarks, around the time of the last election, and would love to read her recent stuff.

still haven't read the novels ...

oh yeah also worth plugging: that site also links to her paris review interviews, which just became freely available as part of their site re-jig

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.

these are some thoughts some people have

yeah sure, and that's actually a good way of putting it. hell, she certainly doesn't beat you over the head with any grand authorial voice. her prose is usually very unshowy, and she has a way of articulating the intuitive and even the banal but makes those thoughts fresh in a way that makes it seem like you are both in your head and out of it (or in the head of someone else that has these kind of banal though/connections and at the same time out of of that person's head). Her style is very Hemmingway (and by extension, Carver-esque) but she updates it in that the style reflects this condition that we all feel like we are living in a fiction/ dream that somehow doesn't line up with the fiction/dream that we see all around us, but still kind of does, or maybe we just still wish it did ... and this all makes us alienated from ourselves yadda yadda yadda .... so we "tell ourselves stories in order to live" in order to pinch ourselves and gain control and understanding and order but it never totally works so we keep doing it.

(And if Joan Didion were saying the above yammer she would do it much more effectively obv)

And her viewpoint is very American, very West Coast and I wonder how may people that are not so into her are not American and/or whether that makes a difference.

And for everyone who hasn't read her fiction, I would say pick up "Play It As It Lays" (very short and reads quickly too). Her fiction-writing style is also very cool and minimal and even reporterly, but also looser and plays up the dreamy haziness and it even has its experimental moments (one of her main things is switching between 1st and 3rd person).

in that "yeah I get it, so what the hell is so great a bout this" kind of way, but to me it's much more feminine

And maybe it is an American thing.

ha ha ... didn't mean to post those last two sentences

That is an interesting, suggestive-looking defence of Didion. Your sense of 'we are living in a fiction/ dream that somehow doesn't line up with the fiction/dream that we see all around us' seems to be quite true to an element of her work.

The idea that she is very American etc is interesting too, though I would like to hear what 'very West Coast' means in a writer. Perhaps English people say 'very Northern' and others don't know what it is supposed to mean; or perhaps they do know.

I didn't know I'd said she was unadventurous, but then it turned out I had. Of course the word doesn't matter much, or could be less precise than I wanted. Romeo says she's unshowy. That might be getting at the same thing. Certainly there are lots of ways of being a good writer. So, can a prose writer really be adventurous at all?

I thought about it, and I think I can name three who have been: James Joyce, Roland Barthes, Paul Morley -- all of whose writing has thrilled and moved me a good deal.

[btw I am English and on reflection I don't think I know what would be meant by 'very Northern', beyond differences in accents.

Probably only Stuart Maconie understands or credits this ontological divide]

I think that there's often an adventurousness to "unadventurousness," to prose characterized by its economy and seeming simplicity. Pinefox, stuff that you consider adventurous seems to be more maximal vs. the minimalness of Didion/Carver/Hemmingway (and his iceberg theory). Well, maximal certainly applies to Joyce and Pynchon (who you mention upthread). Barthes is pretty minimal for a cultural critic but I don't think he can be compared to Didion so well; two different projects. (I haven't read Morley, so no comment there). Funny that the 3 minimal authors I mention are all American (and even all-American .. ha). I don't think this style is necessarily American but it's probably more American than European and I really can't think of any British minimalists off the top of my head. Camus and Peter Handke would qualify as European minimalists I think.

As far as my "west coast" comment is concerned. There's definitely a kind of US west/east coast binary. It's really hard to get into that without making a lot of cringeworthy generalizations. And, unfortunately, California, and particularly LA/Hollywood are the big West Coast metonyms, and East Coast is often reduced to New York City and New England and the rest of both coasts are kind of different things that get left out and/or placed elsewhere. But anyways, West Coast ... long days, big vistas, highways, cars, movies, Manifest Destiny, gold rush and get-rich-quick, American Dream, the (obv bullshit) idea of American Utopia, deserts, sunshine, sexual freedom and transgression, anonymity (and making oneself new), and, later, counterculture and drugs ... that kind of thing ... and there's a disillusionment/aftermath to all that and it informs Didion's work. And, and this is I think what I was getting at really, I find Didion's style to be particularly West Coast in its spareness and imagery. I'm thinking mostly here of "Play It As It Lays" which is a Hollywood novel and has a lot of restless and purposeless highway driving and the alienation-from-self and fiction/dream thing I was talking about, and all of that isreflected in the style.

Of course, Pynchon is West Coast too ... so West Coast doesn't necessarily equal minimal.

And I think I only have a really vague idea of what "Northern" means, btw. I mean I guess there's, historically, the industrial and working-class-ness of some Northern cities, right? I dunno. Maybe someone can enlighten.

Didion's Where I Was From explicitly & at length explains how she is west coast. The character of California, the formation of what she'd call its character (I agree with her that there is a specifically Californian culture, an outlook; not that all who live there share it, necessarily, but that there is such a thing that informs and drives life there), has long obsessed her, and is almost always in play in her fiction. It has to do with property & water rights & a desire for comfort, an elevation of comfort as a sort of indication of grace -- it also has to do with a sort of preemptive alienation. That's like only a little of it, though - I went and got the book off the shelf, but I haven't read it in a while, and it's complex & elegant, I wouldn't want to just grab a good pull-quote. If the question "how is Didion a west coast writer?" is of interest to you, you should pick it up, anyway.

whenever I hear this chick's name I think she's actually a folk singer... man who am i thinking of...

preemptive alienation is exactly the vibe of didion's writing

Did she ever write horror? She has a good stylistic fit for it. (Maybe writing about the west coast is de facto horror ha!)

The bit I just read about seeing a Newport Beach high school team play against Costa Mesa in the 80s and getting beaten & the Newport kids chanting "Hey hey, that's OK, you're gonna work for us one day" counts as horror I think

I wish instead of a camera crew, MTV sent her and David Foster Wallace to document those "my super sweet 16" things.

Philip, I love you.

In general, I like her hundred-word sentences more than her five-word ones.

I've read *where I was from*. I was somewhat disappointed by it. I like the picture on the front of my copy.

I thought *play as it lays* was very poor, probably the worst Didion I've read.

I agree that adventure / unadventure looks like it plays out as maximal / minimal but I was somewhat trying to avoid that. Joyce is adventurous cos his style is (at times) flamboyant and expansive, yes, but also cos it changed so many times - that's truly an adventure, the Odyssey of style. Barthes also remade himself time and again - and his prose changed with it - but there is also a sense of reaching out in his prose, walking out on the tightrope if you like - which I suppose Morley shares. Morley also has daftness and namedropping, lots of things compacted together into a mix that people continually attack. (Another word that one wants to use is 'risk' in the writing, though again it might be approximate or even less helpful; none of these people was actually going to get hurt on account of their writing, save perhaps Joyce in a turbulent Europe.)

(reflection: when you set up any kind of principle ['I like un / adventurous writing'] it quickly becomes problematic in one way or another. In some ways I have come to suspect that the judgements we make are often about one writer at a time, sometimes even just one text, and not generalizable in the way we might think or want.)

It does seem that I am saying or concluding that writing in a minimal or plain way is likely to be relatively unadventurous, at the level of style. I think that's probably true. But it's true that plain writing can be good, for various purposes.

To corroborate that I don't like 'maxmimal' writing as such, I can recall that (to open another can of exploding sardines) I am largely on James Wood's side in the old hysterical realism debate. I don't think Pynchon's expansiveness necessarily makes for good fiction; Rushdie's makes for what feels to me like actively bad or at least deeply tiresome fiction.

Princess Tam Tam: Joan Baez? whose sister married Pynchon's best buddy at a wedding attended by Dylan?

(Joyce's first book of fiction was relatively very plain, indeed a model for plainness in the short story; moving beyond that was part of the adventure.)

(as I recollect it now, the effect of Didion's style in the *fiction* is not so much of plainness but more of mannerism - one which didn't come off for me. Perhaps there is a more genuine plainness in the non-fiction; which as I've often said, I think is better than the fiction of hers that I've read. But then perhaps I am the only one using the word 'plain' anyway.)

(Actually I come to think that 'mannerism' is a key word here, ie in some writers, sometimes, minimalism is not plain [as we might tend to assume it is] but mannered.

But talk of mannerism then I think raises the meta-question: why is mannerism bad? Some of us like some mannerisms in art. So again, articulating a general principle possibly doesn't get you very far.)

Ambrosia for Didion fans:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n06/david-thomson/what-does-a-snake-know-or-intend

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3144/2671216059_f49c822c86.jpg

I thought *play as it lays* was very poor, probably the worst Didion I've read.

Ha, well, yes, I think we're going to want to shake hands and agree that men of society are often found to differ in their tastes - I consider Play It As It Lays one of the definitive works of modern fiction, on par with any of the finest novels of the 20th century

yeah, nothing beats play it as it lays for me -- i read part of it years ago and didn't get it and finally went through the whole thing in one sitting during a horrible, much-delayed, overnight flight a few months ago and it left me feeling a bit like i'd just witnessed a murder or something.

among other things, it's maybe the best description of what it's like to be clinically depressed that i've ever read.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5145/5561062104_fcabc806cd.jpg

mmm pizza

whoa that book-bench thing is sick as hell! i hate like... holding pages... down...

man you gotta respect the pinefox & I am saying this from the heart. he knows he does not dig Joan Didion, but he continues to engage her. this is what actually being into literature/writing is about imo, instead of the hedonism that seems most prevalent to me, the view of reading as pure pleasure-seeking. I don't think there's anything at all wrong with reading what you love (except insofar as Catholicism impels me to condemn any pleasure-seeking to some extent) but I think really engaging stuff that puts you off is the mark of an actual lover of words so my hat is off to the pinefox.

yeah pinefox is one of the best

that is not pizza, surely

i think it is a pancake, is there a thread where americans laugh at the british idea of what constitutes a pancake yet

It looks like a crepe!

crepe is just french for pancake imo

crepe w/ lemon + sugar for sure

Yes, it is a pancake, which I think is possibly identical to the French crepe with lemon and sugar.

I don't dislike the US version of pancake but on balance I think I prefer ours (or the French). But I am now finding it hard to remember just what the US version is like. One way that I don't agree with the Americans is that they eat pancakes with meat; I think pancakes should be sweet.

I am very surprised and touched by those who have complimented me on my reading as a result of my pancake image.

just wanna say how awesome it is that pinefox, when confronted with people complimenting him on his pizza when he is actually clearly eating a crepe, continues to engage with them. doesn't just say, what kind of pizza has lemon on it.

a little lemon is actually great on pizza

just gonna wait for this thread to become a five thousand post trainwreck in response to that, pretty sure ILX is built on pizza fascism

"cheese and lemon actually go together really well. like those snacks you'd have at parties as a child; a little hunk of cheese and a little cube of lemon on a cocktail stick"

We could ask our friend Joan.

I am writing this because I want to say that there are many flavours of pizza. I have experienced several of them, and while this is not without its interest, it is not what I wish to express here. I wish to say that a little lemon can be acceptable on a pizza. I discovered this at a pizza restaurant in San Francisco. This may not seem important, but it has continued to seem important to me. I have been trying to understand why this should be so for the last twenty-two years, but I am not sure that I am any closer to the answer.

You made that up.

actually will be kinda bummed if interesting author discussion gets tabled for jokes

I think pastiche is a form of understanding.

http://maxsilvestri.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/pancakeonstick.jpg

stick it

actually will be kinda bummed if interesting author discussion gets tabled for jokes

― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, March 26, 2011 5:02 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Just got another Didion book in the mail actually. "The Book of Common Prayer." Probably won't be able to get to it for a few months though.

Give it a couple of decades.

I am writing this because I want to say that there are many flavours of pizza...

I just want to say how awesome this parody was, esp "a pizza restaurant in San Francisco".

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/oct/11/theyll-take-manhattan-3/

I found this rather brutal attack on Didion to be interesting and persuasive, even though I still mildly enjoy some of Didion's writing... I absolutly LOVE Harrison's writing since discovering this essay...

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

yeah thats talked abt upthread iirc

there's a bit of unfairness and misreading inherent in any hatchet job. didion herself once wrote a piece on woody allen's 'manhattan' that was just as unfair as the harrison piece. that essay is good at ridiculing didion's writing style and making fun of her as a person in a quasi-witty way (i guess -- i didn't actually find it funny), viz a viz:

Didion is like a latter-day Scarlett O'Hara: she will think about whatever it is she thinks about tomorrow when she dabbles her toes in her pool, all the while calling attention beguilingly to the hairshirt she has fashioned for herself . . . which may explain why so many male critics find her adorable.

but when i read something that drenched in self-regard, i feel like i'm learning more about the writer than the subject.

Can anyone find me a quote from Slouching? I can't find my copy. I think it's toward the beginning of the title essay and the basic thrust is that the pre-hippie generation was conformist and career-minded not because they were blindly accepting but because they were skeptical about alternatives.

but when i read something that drenched in self-regard

kind of describes the Lamp posting style tho no

^^^see we can do this all day

I have to say I enjoyed reading both Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Although I really didn't like how she wrote about Joan Baez in "Where the Kissing Never Stops". I just thought that was too much smoke up the ass.

I loved Run, River and Salvador but didn't care for Play It As It Lays at all-BLEHK. Haven't read more Didion.

When I compare Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's "Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses" and "Italian Days" to anything Didion wrote...I favor Harrison by far.

^^^see we can do this all day

well i certainly believe that you have nothing better to do, sure

fifty years from now Harrison is a name cloaked in absolute, total obscurity, remembered by no-one save her direct descendants, while people will still be reading Joan Didion for her tremendous sentences & unimpeachable tone and gift for pacing, rhythm...in short, her style

meet me here in fifty years and pay me if you want any action on this proposition

*looks at joan didion through smoke* xp

its mostly lol that u have a dogg in this fite, i mean since when can u read books?

idk i didnt think harrison's essay was particularly self-regarding (or funny?) & did a decent job sketching didion's empty-headed snobbery. i suppose she takes herself (or really her politics) quite seriously, & i can see mistaking that kind of self-seriousness for arrogance.

Harrison raises some pretty sharp and on-point criticisms of Didion there, to the point that I don't know if I will be able to experience Didion the same way next time I read her. At the same time, I think she makes her case a little too forcefully though and it weakens the argument.

idk i didnt think harrison's essay was particularly self-regarding (or funny?) & did a decent job sketching didion's empty-headed snobbery. i suppose she takes herself (or really her politics) quite seriously, & i can see mistaking that kind of self-seriousness for arrogance.

― neti pot, kombucha, how to die alone (Lamp), Wednesday, June 15, 2011 6:16 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wait who's clowning who about reading books

i can see how people read didion's self-conscious distance as "empty-headed snobbery" but to me it just reads as a manifestation of her own insecurity and depression

d-40 if i bow my head in defeat now, will you just stop posting on this subboard?

i think she also expresses that pretty plainly

i kind of imagine her as the narrator of 'peoples parties'

i can see how people read didion's self-conscious distance as "empty-headed snobbery" but to me it just reads as a manifestation of her own insecurity and depression

― ☂ (max), Wednesday, June 15, 2011 2:22 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i think it's this and her version of ethics, too. i think i said so upthread somewhere.

i mean kind of nakedly so, actually. the clinical quality of her writing can seem cold and condescending but i think its also about being genuinely afraid of investing herself more in... politics, say. or whatever.

ive only read the white album and slouching toward bethlehem though.

i kind of imagine her as the narrator of 'peoples parties'

― arachno-misogynist (D-40), Wednesday, June 15, 2011 2:24 AM (54 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yes, totally, she and joni are both of the same school of relating (slash not relating) to people

especially in the 60s so many of her peers were doing some version of what she does in slouching toward bethlehem, reporting on real people, but doing it in a way that trampled the boundaries between the journalist and the subject; the journalist got to pretend to be in the subjects head in sort of an invasive, exaggerated way. she never really does that, and i think her self-consciousness is about announcing her presence in the story and preserving her subjects' stories as separate and their own. it reads very scrupulous to me.

it reminds me of how "shy" can very easily come across as "intimidating." though ill admit that sometimes the insecurity/distance is indistinguishable from snobbery/condescension

xp yes, totally.

i think she's hyper-aware of the "problem" of a journalist's detachment from her subjects and she's really worried about the condescension inherent in romanticizing them (compare her to Capote on this, for example). She often strikes me as really sympathetic to those she writes about, especially when they're women, for example in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" (I love that essay) and the one about Joan Baez. But it's an intellectualized, detached sympathy for sure: I think that that's in part a function of her personality (she's often talked about her shyness and how hard calling up people for interviews is for her) and in part an ethical decision. again, compare "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" to In Cold Blood on this.

-- horseshoe (horseshoe), Sunday, 12 November 2006 19:06 (11 months ago) Link

fucking capote

well said! i agree!

lol sorry i am obsessed with this thread and didion and the pinefox. obviously.

i can see how people read didion's self-conscious distance as "empty-headed snobbery" but to me it just reads as a manifestation of her own insecurity and depression

harrison touches on this in her essay but i think theres something - i guess it goes beyond snobbishness - in her 'depression', a quality of disdain or yes, condenscension, about 'people' that i find off-putting? id like to describe this better but its been a long time but i think she uses her despair as a way of codifying certain prejudices, of building these monuments to her own 'taste' or 'style', idk.

i guess its interesting to think of that as its own 'ethic' but again: i think 'distance' is useful in helping see/present ppl distinct from the writer but i also think it can obscure, make ppl hard to see truly?

i think she has one of those brains that is not just very good but also sort of compulsive about finding... flaws? i guess? in herself, in her surroundings, etc. and this can make her sympathetic to her subjects... but it also makes her kind of terrifying.

tbh i am sort of reverse-engineering her because she reminds me a lot of my girlfriend, and i know my girlfriend a lot better than i know JD

also i think part of the problem is that 'a book of common prayer' is the one thing that i remember best & its certainly not a work to judge her as a writer on? i dont think her detachment/irony works that well in fiction of this kind? everything w/ qns mark tonight idk

i think she has one of those brains that is not just very good but also sort of compulsive about finding... flaws? i guess? in herself, in her surroundings, etc. and this can make her sympathetic to her subjects... but it also makes her kind of terrifying.

i think this is otm. another way of saying "scrupulous."

i haven't actually read that much of didion's fiction...i remember democracy, which i liked. i am kind of a stan, though, and not to be relied on.

this Harrison person's reading of "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" is so bad

heh i just read the first line of the essay

that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo

i mean talk about empty-headed snobbery! but w/v

i know she picked the worst possible way to start that essay. she just seems like an asshole tbh.

she just doesn't seem like a good reader of Didion to me; she's all worked up that Didion is concerned with surfaces, and she is, but it's a way of getting at stuff. Harrison misses all the stuff.

omg i'm just posting all the same things i posted to ilx 5 years ago :/

thinking about it more i think some of what you admire, horseshoe - the refusal to really psychologize or reduce - is what makes her fiction unsuccessful for me. like, the characters in 'common prayer' have a sort of uncanny valleyness to them, the exist as impossible simulacra. i mean i think thats partly intentional ("i have not been the witness i wanted to be") but think this manqué quality extends beyond being purposeful.

that whole first paragraph of the harrison just makes me feel like omar telling weebay "when u come at the king, you best not miss." if you are going to try and murk didion you have to BODY her because otherwise people reading your essay are just going to be thinking about how good didion is at doing exactly what youre failing to do.

i haven't read the book of common prayer, but i don't think she refuses to psychologize; she just does it fitfully, tentatively and obliquely. it works in democracy which i think is semi-autobiographical and also largely about the trickiness of and gaps in memory. (i guess harrison must hate it.)

but maybe i am undermining my case for didion as an ultimately sympathetic interlocutor. TBH i kinda like it when she is being a mean girl! imo the 60s sort of deserved it. xp

i also think if you write an essay accusing Didion of being all style no substance and thereby invite comparisons between the style of your own essay and Didion's superior style, well, you've kind of played yourself. or is that exactly what you just said, max. otm.

yes that is exactly what i just said, i just used violent metaphors and compared it to the wire

when i say she's sympathetic, it's because i believe she cares about the people she writes about. i don't exactly think she's sympathetic in the sense of being likeable. her meanness is purposeful.

whenever i think about didion at length i realize i am comparing her to jane austen in my mind. not sure if this is really accurate at all, but i love both those mean ladies.

xp lol i should go to bed

heh, all i meant is that when people object to didion over her meanness/snobbishness i want to go in two directions--i want to say both, "well, DUH, that's why i like her," but also, "she's actually not that mean or snobby"

i always want to say joan didion is a snob because she's actually better than everybody else

but yeah, i don't really think she's a snob, just awkward. omg how do i keep saying the same thing?

i always want to say joan didion is a snob because she's actually better than everybody else

― horseshoe, Wednesday, June 15, 2011 3:04 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm. you are otm all over this thread!

but i don't think she refuses to psychologize; she just does it fitfully, tentatively and obliquely

yeh, sure, you put it better: she refuses 'to get inside their heads'. which i can see as a virtue in her reporting! certainly that kind of empathizing can involve submerging someone in an entirely alien terminology (lol, projecting)

i admire harrison's essay for not really attempting any 'elegance' but just coming at it blunt & ugly. the lavender thing was terrible tho, yeah.

her meanness is purposeful

yes, sometimes! & the 60s did deserve it! but sometimes i just feels like smallness to me, rather than real objectivity.

haha maybe the pinefox will wake up soon & carry this torch for me, but i think im ~done~

i wish someone had revived a thread abt an author we all liked :/

no, it's good that all these smart people dislike didion. but it means i will never stop obsessing about her. or sleep.

i think this is my favorite joan didion mean girl moment

[re: her takedown of woody allen in the nyrb]

To the Editors:

What piques screenwriter Joan Didion so much about those large, enthusiastic audiences Woody Allen gets is that they seem to recognize themselves in lives that Didion finds unimportant. People who live such lives are unimportant to Didion because they “go to restaurants and ask one another hard questions” about “relationships,” something only “adolescents” still discuss much. Evidently where Joan Didion lives problems of love and psyche evaporate in a haze of margaritas by age twenty-one and folks can get down to the real business of living—which is what, by the way, if it isn’t the self or others? Losing weight? More likely, it’s vocations. Careers. Movie deals.

Didion complains that Woody Allen is stuck in the “fairly recent” notion of finding or making or inhabiting the self, as a central obsession. She’s right that it’s recent: those who trace it back to Augustine are exaggerating, a little. But surely the literature of “recent” centuries is richer for the works of people who’ve made this same faux pas. It’s what modern narrative art is mostly about, and Didion is sophomoric (“adolescent?”) in complaining that Woody Allen hasn’t managed to rehabilitate pre-modern modes of being, such as “attaining grace.” Didion would make a vice out of the fact that Woody Allen keeps to the side of the street he knows best—the sign of a tyro, by the standards of Hollywood, where a “writer” is someone who can dish out visions of the Gold Rush, the Boxer Rebellion, or the Lower East Side with equal competence. She calls the narrowness of Woody Allen’s focus “self-absorption.” Another word for it is modesty.

Admittedly there’s nothing modest about the list of things he lives for in Manhattan, but that’s not what Didion doesn’t like about it. Instead she notes that it’s “modishly eclectic,” which is a too deft way of saying that the list isn’t governed by any particular fashion or set of fashions. Here Didion’s need to attack the mindlessly modish audience (for roller-skating in crumpled linen, is it?) overcomes her intellectual honesty. The “Jupiter,” as she knows, is not at all a stylishly unfamiliar symphony—I think I’ve heard it in the Park—nor is a passion for “Potato Head Blues” likely to win you fancy friends. Didion may resent Woody Allen’s public display of his connoiseurship—and a (gorgeously) indulgent scene it is, too—but she shouldn’t pretend she knows his tastes to be modish when she can’t, because they ain’t. For instance: she says that the point of listing Sentimental Education is to obviate a gauche reference to Madame Bovary. A subtle discrimination, indeed! To know which of these two novels is hipper than the other betrays a suspiciously keen eye for what’s in, what’s out. Keener than Allen’s.

Which brings me to his defense on one last point, and here I’m answering not only Joan Didion, but also my friend Michael Wood, who in these pages [NYR, June 29, 1978] made the point that Allen doesn’t know as much as he implies about the bulk of his literary references. Probably there’s truth in this; that bulk is rather large. But when an allusion is apt—and even illuminating—it deserves credit even from the knowing. And the concerns of Sentimental Education have an eerie relevance to the concerns of Manhattan. In Frédéric Moreau as in the character Woody is endlessly playing, strength of feeling isn’t a source of action but rather an enfeeblement. By reminding us of the barely sympathetic, weak Frédéric, Woody Allen is reinforcing not the central character but those others in the film (or in the audience) who doubt his strength, his maturity, his authenticity. To say that this similarity in the themes of the two works is just accidental might be quite correct, but it would also be an instance of not crediting on the screen what we wouldn’t hesitate to find—and maybe praise—in a flawed but intelligent novel.

John Romano

Columbia University, New York City

Joan Didion replies:

Oh, wow.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/oct/11/theyll-take-manhattan-3/

i mean sometimes i just admire her as a master zinger, frankly

yeah, that's classic.

she's right that manhattan isn't a serious movie in the way woody allen aspires for it to be, but she does come off sort of joyless in the review. such a good movie!

ya it kinda bugs me that she dislikes woody but i cant really imagine them inhabiting the same world anyway so ill settle for ignoring her article and savoring her "oh, well"

lol i mean "oh, wow"

morelike oh, snap

It's a little odd or touching to see Michael Wood crop up in that 1978 letter.

i don't think she's a snob or anything, she's just really brainy.

it can be hard for girls to write about the world without feeling pompous. i think she suffers at times from a slight self-consciousness when making declarations but she still makes them anyway, thank goodness.

I never read Joan Didion. I would see her books in stores and heard people talk about her. I always grouped her with Susan Sontag for some reason and assumed her work had no relevance for me and my concerns. If I love Marguerite Duras and Marina Tsvetaeva, should I read Didion?

No!

Estela, why can be hard for girls to write about the world without feeling pompous? Curious. Also are you referring to Didion when you say "she suffers at times from a slight self-consciousness when making declarations but she still makes them anyway..." because Didion should be not only a woman at this point but a seasoned author.

she's otm about Manhattan.

I still prefer her political writing to anything else: her talent for skewering people for their language never found a better, to quote T.S. Eliot, objective correlative.

Most of us remember very well these secret signals and sighs of adolescence, remember the dramatic apprehension of our own mortality and other “more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe,” but eventually we realize that we are not the first to notice that people die. “Even with all the distractions of my work and my life,” Woody Allen was quoted as saying in a cover story (the cover line was “Woody Allen Comes of Age”) in Time, “I spend a lot of time face to face with my own mortality.” This is actually the first time I have ever heard anyone speak of his own life as a “distraction.

BOOM!

How exactly is that a criticism of Woody Allen?

oh, wow

How is it not?

Midnight in Paris is the latest example of an Allen film being so damn clumsy about its literary allusions; they're more like tags of erudition than references.

Woody Allen never tries to hide in his films how he believes much in life is a distraction from death, to make work, love etc a waiting/putting off of death. I don't see how his own honesty about this neuroses is a criticism.

I don't think he's hiding it in his films!

oh whoops sorry -- you said that. Anyway, why should give him credit for honesty?

she's also arguing that these attitudes -- and how he clothes them in undifferentiated psychoanalytic jargon -- are juvenile.

Then am I not getting something? Is she take Allen to task as a person or a film maker?

I'm not necessarily giving him credit for being honesty. I just don't think there has ever been undercover motives with Allen's films. Scenes From a Mall is not a literary references to Bergman, but a love of him films and knowing he could never recreate it. But he tried. Woody Allen has always been himself which is a failed person who can't sort life out. He admires other peoples work and borrows heavily from it. Sure America isn't attached to freudian babble, but Allen was, for better or worse. I think through his failures he manages to create a body of work that is distinctly his own. I think the failures Didion points out about Allen are included in his films, he displays it. I mean yeah that's him.

Geez I should sleep

So many good posts in this thread, esp from horseshoe and estela. I agree that Harrison comes off as a crank, especially in the beginning of the essay. There's too much envy blurring her better points. In the part where she lays out the "trick" to Didion's sentences, I found myself thinking "but...that's a great sentence" at almost every example she uses. Didion's style is unimpeachable. Which is a shame because I think Harrison's more political point about Didion seems like a fair criticism. There IS something very End-Of-History-conservative about Didion's almost knee-jerk skepticism of anyone who seems to hold a sincere belief in something.

assumed her work had no relevance for me and my concerns

this is odd to me!

Estela, why can be hard for girls to write about the world without feeling pompous? Curious. Also are you referring to Didion when you say "she suffers at times from a slight self-consciousness when making declarations but she still makes them anyway..." because Didion should be not only a woman at this point but a seasoned author.

― *tera, Wednesday, June 15, 2011 6:39 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i can't obviously speak for estela but when i read didion i very much get the sense that her fantastic ability to read situations, places and people means that shes also very aware (too aware, maybe) of her own place in those situations, and that awareness, combined with a ready insecurity and--this is maybe what estela alludes to?--an early life in which she was taught, implicitly and explicitly, as many women were and are, that she should be quiet and avoid pronouncement and confrontation, turns into a fear of pomposity.

i mean i wouldnt say didion has a 'slight' self-consciousness--i feel like (in what ive read which is not everything didion!) shes all self-consciousness. & i think that self-consciousness is (insofar as its what gives her that ability to read situations and relationships and so forth) what makes her so good, but (insofar as heightened self-awareness can, maybe even tends to, lead to crippling insecurity) it also makes her scared of how she must sound.

i just woke up so that probably doesnt make much sense. also i am over-thinking this. i will say that i think didion's "fear of pomposity"/"self-consciousness" is related less to her lived experience than it is to... "how her brain works" in some sense. so it doesnt matter that shes a seasoned writer now. its like saying "woody allen is successful and respected, why is he still so neurotic."

So many good posts in this thread, esp from horseshoe and estela.

otm. and everyone else! i love didion but its cool to hear ppl like lamp and pinefox getting to the heart of why they're not on board

There IS something very End-Of-History-conservative about Didion's almost knee-jerk skepticism of anyone who seems to hold a sincere belief in something.

Can you develop this? What I see isn't skepticism of sincerity so much as scorn for malnourished or incoherent thinking in support of a sincere position.

Martin Amis, in the rather good essay on Didion's style already referenced by Pinefox above, suspects her of being "defensive" in her attack on Manhattan. He accuses her of being scathing about other people's lack of cultural and literary sophistication while repeatedly betraying her own. The argument is subtle and doesn't lend itself to easy summary, but it's worth getting hold of the piece if you're interested in Didion and/or Amis.

Writers being writers shockah

It doesn't read like that, Alfred. There are enough similarities (and political differences) between the two writers to arouse suspicion of professional jealousy but in fact Amis, who's perfectly capable of being bitchy and partisan, seems to be doing his best to be scrupulously fair on this occasion. He's willing to praise Didion for what he finds good in her. It's an intelligent, perceptive and balanced piece of criticism.

I wasn't trying to be glib, mind: a writer always betrays his biases when criticizing fellow writers for their own.

He does in one way, in that essay: he says 'all of us are fascinated by what we most deplore' -- which sounds much more like a reference to MA than to JD.

Otherwise, Frankiemachine OTM and it's still the best thing I've read about Didion.

i'm not convinced martin amis is enough of a human being to deplore anything, to be honest

'we are all of us most fascinated by what we most feel mildly inconvenienced by and/or superior to'

estela and joan didion not entirely dissimilar in prose style imo

Thanks, Max.

In 50 years from now(or now for that matter), if a person were to read both Didion and Harrison, ignoring all of the hype and critical opinion surrounding Didion, and just read them both as objectively as possible, they would find Harrison a much better, more substancial writer, Imo... yes, her hatchet job is a little over the top, and jealousy may have been a factor, but there is also quite a lot of truth to her arguments, Imo... If one were to read her collection of essays "Off center", you would see that Harrison is a very brilliant writer, and that unlike Didiom, she is very 'common sense' oriented and down to earth... Didion give the impression, Imo, of being a lofty, out of touch, arrogant, snobbish, judgemental elitist, while Harrison gives the impression of being smart, witty, compassionate, articulate, reasonable and earthy... Harrison was a left wing feminist, but she was also very suspicious of dogma and ideology on either political extreme... she is certainly opinionated, but she tried to be as reasonable and fair as possible, at the same time... It's sad that she died in 2002...

what's ironic about Didion's article about Woody Allen, is that many of the same criticisms that she spouted about Woody Allen could be equally said to apply to her...

Maybe in the early days. She barely makes allusions to other writers and in the last ten years has stripped her prose of any bombast.

i dont hear much referentialism in her early days either?

Didion give the impression, Imo, of being a lofty, out of touch, arrogant, snobbish, judgemental elitist

This is about as wrong as wrong gets.

definitely didion's body of work should be dismissed because she's not "earthy" enough

i dont hear much referentialism in her early days either?

I mean, I complained upthread that she seems to have stopped reading novels in the late sixties.

earthy vs lofty is one of the lamest binaries ever.

I agree with you, jd.

I do not dislike Didion but found Harrison more impressive. But there aren't many Harrison readers here?

sounds like my politics are closer to harrison's than didion's (to the extent that i can make out didion's commitments) but i don't ever need to read anything else harrison wrote

pwn didion

for those not familiar with Harrison, here is a bit of info about her... I wish it was possible to post more of her essays, but they don't seem to be avaliable over the internet at this time, unfortunatly...

http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-lierary-criticism/harrison-barbara-grizzuti

It is true that she does seem to have a propensity to sort of "attack" the rich and famous and powerful... She also wrote hatchet jobs on Jane Fonda, Billy Graham, Oprah Winfrey etc... yet, perhaps the rich and famous and powerful deserve to be critisized...

sorry, there was a misspelling in the last post:

http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/harrison-barbara-grizzuti

as literary hatchet jobs go, i don't think it's a patch on renata adler's 'the perils of pauline.'

hey hurting did you ever find that quote about the 50s generation? if it's the one i'm thinking of, it's actually from the white album:

"we were the generation called 'silent,' but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the era's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. we were silent because the exhiliration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate."

or perhaps that's not the quote you were thinking of at all. still a good one, though.

have been re-reading all the pre magical thinking non-fiction this week as collected in that big everyman's omnibus that came out a few years back and this thread has been very interesting to read through. while i am probably more a horseshoe/aero partisan than a pinfoxian skeptic, i wonder if pinefox ever did bother with the later nonfiction. she nevers loses her essential didion-ness, but the early essays (which i revere for reasons as much personal as literary) do seem (as others here have said) as much about working out her own shit (paralyzing fear leading to inaction) at a time when to-the-barricades action was the "proper" response, coupled with a natural skepticism. from salvador on, there's still that deep fatalism, but with a newer (and less solipsistic?) (not using solipsism as a neg here, btw) view that social justice might not totally be an incompatible mug's game for a life lived in a constant state of existential dread and the we're-all-gonna-die search for a point that might not (probably won't) be there.

I think that is the quote I was thinking of, unless she expressed the same idea elsewhere.

have been re-reading all the pre magical thinking non-fiction this week as collected in that big everyman's omnibus

same here, inspired by this thread

I found myself annoyed as I read Slouching Through Bethlehem by a few passages that use understatement to shore up savage judgments, but the overall impression is of a very young person who through scary intelligence and self-discipline learned to see and write like someone older and wiser. One of the cool things about that omnibus is watching her grow into that person. By Salvador, which I'm reading now, she seems fully in command of her powers and more aware and accepting of her weaknesses, and she makes a terrifying witness.

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.

It's not important, but CF's early biography and mine are identical (except for gender). It's a leap from there to understanding her presuppositions, but I imagine that I can.

has her newt gingrich piece been linked here lately

max linked it in i think the primary thread

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/aug/10/the-teachings-of-speaker-gingrich/

finished blue nights after taking it out from my library

they put an insert slip in the front of the book that sez "Help other readers! Evaluate this book" & has rows headed by: age/gender - comment - rating (out of ten)

i wrote - 32 M - made me terrified of ageing - 7/10

this is sad but i lol'd at this

I've been trying to fight my way through this because of the book tour. I don't actually want to do the book tour, because it's tiring and ... it's a book tour. Then I keep thinking: If you didn't go on the book tour, you would have failed, and so this question of doing the thing -- going to the airport, getting on the airplane, going to Toronto, where you don't want to go ever in your whole life -- is on some level necessary. Otherwise you have failed yourself.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/03/joan-didion-cancels-la-appearance.html

just picked up blue nights from the lib. i accidentally requested the large print edition, and it's all a bit distracting to have the book in such huge font, and with boldface in lieu of italics.

no she insisted it be published like that, it's to make its insights into ageing more tangible

the audiobook is narrated in the tone of voice you would use to speak to an elderly, hard-of-hearing father-in-law

I wasn't crazy about BN :(

how so, alfred? not that you can't differ, only a friend read it & seemed to not like it for the exact reasons i thought it was really successful

She's often at her most powerful inserting those perfectly timed caesurae. A few motifs here are sensual (e.g. the fried chicken). But she didn't transform the material like its predecessor did.

i'm liking it so far. had to stop reading on the train because i was getting too emotional. same thing happened to me when i tried to read magical thinking on a plane. should just read it at home with my cat.

mmm. sensual is a good way to put it. the friend who wasn't so into it talked about being bemused by things like seeing her red shoes at the altar, why that was relevant, radiant. i think it really neatly succeeded at two things; first, though it wasn't intending to, painting a kind of elliptical portrait of quintana through those fragments, fleshing out these parameters that she existed in between, unavoidably conjuring someone, half-sullen and always young. and secondly phrasing all of those recollections, sensuous or stray, as what they were to didion, now; incomplete, snatched memories, every part of the thing itself gone, each remembrance the only clay she had left to play with*. & i felt it was more about those than the first thing, that inasmuch as we were meant to be responding to what she remembered it was just as a solipsistic thing, displaying what that debris was to JD.

xp, i can see how reading it in public might be kinda trying, rayuela

*i just read this daniel clowes thing, where he talked about his mother dying, how it'd be like if someone told you you could never see the ocean again - could have fun, but just would never see the ocean. i've never read proust or anything but i like those things that are trying to process what memory feels like, where it fits.

finished reading 'the year of magical thinking' just now and i liked it quite a bit, much more than i have anything else of hers. there are places where i think its sort of clunky or flaccid but the spell she casts over her life was so immersive and resonant to me the the dinners at candide with wasp dougherty the faded spode china the rewrites at the wilshire and the flights to cartagena and they way it flowed around her mourning, her daughters illness... she herself hints that shes romanticizing things but it reads like an elegy for a disappearing american leisure class. im not sure its supposed to, and the parts directly dealing death are good but seemed less vital than the other stuff, this idea of a life of grace and good linen

i found the 'we tell ourselves stories in order to live' collection and 'blue nights' in a thrift store (the same one where i got 'the year of magical thinking' so i guess someone was cleaning house) and im fairly impressed so far. i went to the park after work and sat in the grass and read the first three essays in 'slouching', it sortof kills me that she opens with that yeats poem. i think i can see some of what max and horseshoe are talking about upthread like there are some lines like the one about 'going back to hairdressing college' or the way she repeats and dissects the stories of the cast and crew on the john wayne western that would seem condescending bordering on cruel out of context but become almost admiring in the flow of the essay.

like shes so clear-eyed and cool and ambivalent as a way of managing this deeper despair. her description of the california mindset and california lives you can just ~~feel~~ her paying the wages of national headache and notional dread, its so brittle but precise.

Wait till you get to the political content in Miami and After Henry -- her peak.

things have been in and out lately and i got sort of tired of her reactionary bad temper and cold, nervous fingers picking at the embroidery of other peoples lives but man 'goodbye to all that' is just so fantastic i read it and gave up. i had already read about the 50 yards of theatrical silk somewhere else, probably here itt but who knows, but the essay accumulates so many similar details that match exactly my own experiences and feelings and articulates these all so clearly and rightly that i felt displaced, unmoored. so ive just sorta put her aside and gone back to struggling through the second half of 'underworld', so it goes.

I can't believe I was so hard on poor old Joan.

haha oh man

'the white album' for all its flaws detachment isnt really one. its voyeuristic w/out being insightful, theres a sense of her saving all her compassion for herself, of a despair bordering on the theatrical, the self-regarding. but its also incredibly compelling as a way of documenting the depressive state. or something.

i finally finished 'we tell ourselves stories in order to live', i liked the political stuff w/o thinking much about it i could sort of wave it away and see it outside myself, like as 'stuff' i guess. there are a lot of good posts early in this thread i feel late the party or like im wearing last years clothes now but im glad i finally read her and made my testament

i really enjoyed yr posts lamp, thought i couldn't quite figure out what was motivating you to continue so thoroughly while ambivalent about her. particularly enjoyed this as it has the kind of drunken gallop of a david lehman poem:

finished reading 'the year of magical thinking' just now and i liked it quite a bit, much more than i have anything else of hers. there are places where i think its sort of clunky or flaccid but the spell she casts over her life was so immersive and resonant to me the the dinners at candide with wasp dougherty the faded spode china the rewrites at the wilshire and the flights to cartagena and they way it flowed around her mourning, her daughters illness... she herself hints that shes romanticizing things but it reads like an elegy for a disappearing american leisure class. im not sure its supposed to, and the parts directly dealing death are good but seemed less vital than the other stuff, this idea of a life of grace and good linen

― Lamp, Tuesday, 24 April 2012 06:33 (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.euronews.com/images_news/img_606X341_ikea-monkey-canada-toronto-1112.jpg

amirite?

lmao

i cannot, in all honesty, take credit for this observation.

http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyqdtx9dR31qzh8wko1_500.gif

not too far from the madding crowd?

http://payload59.cargocollective.com/1/4/128429/3489413/6a00d8341c526553ef0131100836a6970c-800wi.jpg

http://www.oystermag.com/joan-didion-stars-in-c-line-ss15-campaign

Didion on Salinger, 1961:

However brilliantly rendered (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogue (and it is), Franny and Zooey is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger’s tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.

ouch

ms. didion has her standards

terrible review imo, but i'm biased

Well, "Franny" zings collegiate male dorks, bulls-eyes, yet almost in passing, in a way that probably got even collegiate male dorks going, "ooooo, zing!" At a time when very few other male writers were doing that, it seems. At the same time, with the same effective understatement, he shows the quiet breakdown, the implosion of Franny. She can't tell her ahole boyfriend (who's snobbish with a jock classmate, then crude & irritable with her) what's wrong; she has to excuse herself to go collapse in the Ladies Room, in a lady-like way.
But in "Zooy," she's lying on the couch, mostly just listening while her older brother casts about, lecturing and telling anecdotes and trying to find just the right thing to snap her out of it. So yeah, that's where the self-help bit comes in, but I also take it that Salinger is lecturing some of his followers, incl. correspondents and people showing up on his doorstep, about not getting too hung up on idealism and questing etc. lecturing himself too, maybe.

I found "Zooy" somewhat off-putting even in high school, even though I could be like that with my own sister (and the letter he reads from Budd put me off reading Seymour: An Introduction Raise etc to this day, alas). So can barely imagine how a young woman in 1961 might have been put off by it, but still think she's a bit too harsh (despite readily acknowledging the power of his writing).

letter from Buddy, that is, one of their older sibs (F and Z are the youngest of their tribe, which we now learn includes several characters in the previous Nine Stories, my fave JD by far. Wonder what Didion thought of it?)

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/3029684-in-a-room-lined-with-bookshelves-quintana-roo-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=OCUJ5gVf7YdJQI2Xhkc2QCAwsgIaw2ppHSUpExLXi2Msaz7S4x03Ipnq9LsB%2FU2ZBdi88Ll0p5FlH1GjT0fSr8rIShQEbvRqg97RusSOs9k%3D

I checked out Play It as It lays from the library a couple of days ago, but not sure when, or if, I'll launch into it.

I don't think that Didion statement on Salinger is very wrong.
But I think Salinger was a better novelist than her.

In one sense, the book is "about being older," she said, and the knowledge accruing from that.
Which was what? an interviewer asked.
Didion's answer made her sound like a child once more, heeding her mother's warnings. "Be a better person," she said. And then, as if the weight of all her losses was borne in upon her--her father's false-cheery calls for a drink, her mother's sad indifference, the valleys' rage to incarcerate the state's kids: "Nobody can ever be nice enough."

she was beginning research on a book abt kobe bryant in fall 2003!

harrison ford flew her to la on his private plane when quintana suffered her fall, etc

http://blog.nola.com/susanlarson/2009/04/large_joangroup.JPG

jd lookin like poochie

Started to put this on the ILE Didion thread, but here tis:
"California Notes" (from unpublished coverage of the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone; the genesis of Where I'm From, she says here)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/05/26/california-notes/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Didion%20California&utm_content=NYR%20Didion%20California+CID_971bb5f3e315687e7e3154ac1d117c1e&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=California%20Notes

Where I Was From, that is.

i'm really unmotivated to finish play it as it lays for a book club that is stagnating partly because of my lack of enthusiasm. the occasional moment of dark humor offers some respite but the rest is so thin that when it tries to be somewhat serious it falls pretty flat. also, weirdly conservative and maybe not-so-weirdly homophobic?

i know it's really short, i could finish it in an hour, i need to just suck it up for the sake of friendship instead of procrastinating for another week.

South and West, ehhh---maybe? Long-ass intro re current political:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/forgotten-accounts/

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

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.

it's as if we want to justify disliking her

it's okay if y'all do!

Skeptical of humankind's capacity for progress more so than the goals, etc.

which makes her more liberal than the average ILXer

whaaat? that distinction has absolutely no meaning in application xp. and that's just ridiculous, alfred. i doubt anyone here would have voted for barry goldwater.

in any case, the pinefox and barbara harrison are clearly otm.

it's as if we want to justify disliking her

it's okay if y'all do!

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 30 December 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Be easy to just dislike her with no reasons huh?

which makes her more liberal than the average ILXer

I'm saying the average ILXer sees no capacity for progress.

Be easy to just dislike her with no reasons huh?

― xyzzzz__

like me and liver!

it's okay if y'all do!

I had my tongue in cheek when I made the remark about disliking her; apologies if it didn't come off.

This is the Harrison piece, right? https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html

Reading her post-1980 material collected in After Henry and Political Fictions, I suspect Ronald Reagan broke her brain, like Reagan did for a lot of elites. Even old-time socialists like Irving Howe, who'd spent a lifetime anticipating a conservative reaction, wrote mid-decade about underestimating its strength.

pinefox has been terrific, especially the last post

her articles at https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/joan-didion/ are a good window on her real-time reactions to Reagan and subsequent administrations ...
I think as she got older her knowledge of US politics and policy deepened and she dropped the small-c contrarianism that weakens some of her early essays

Thanks for that link. (I think her conservatism might have started out like that of The Village Green Preservation Society (as an existential reaction to chaos and disorder and a desire to preserve what she valued and cherished) and that conservatism might connote something different now that there is the possibility of association with the evolving establishment reaction to the far right in the U.S. and in Europe, as well as the xenophobia, racism, and fear. I think maybe she was more forgiving as she got older. The "Oh, wow." made me think of defensive tactics adopted my little old ladies in urban settings, but she was much younger then.)

(I don't think she was hostile or fearful, but rather skeptical and pessimistic and had the inclinations of a reporter.)

(Inadequately researched conjectures regarding Allen and conservatism ...

Allen regretted that he didn't go to college. Didion regretted that she was not accepted by the college of her choice and eventually took it into perspective. [1]

Didion moved to Manhattan as an adult and was an outsider to the East Coast intellectual establishment. Allen had the advantage of having grown up there and was naturally familiar with the East Coast elite's cultural references. Both were not above namedropping. They addressed overlapping audiences from different temperaments.

Both valued merit and bought into meritocracy, which has not survived globalization and the global concentration of wealth and power. Economic insecurity has not provided a sufficient cause to unify the left, which remains fractured for want of unifying beliefs other than concerns about livelihood and the social contract that in themselves do not seem sufficient. I don't think anyone knows the answer to this yet.)

[1] https://wowwritingworkshop.com/on-being-unchosen-by-the-college-of-ones-choice/

(Conjecture: Didion objected to, or found distasteful, Allen's treatment of his female characters and roles but had not yet worked out her own stance on feminism.)

people always ignore or are rude about the novels which I always feel are the best things she did

I consider her a novelist foremost. she's better known for her nonfiction because it's easier to treat. the novels are slippery and masterful examples of the form; with the exception of the last one, each is better than its predecessor. democracy is one of the great books of the 20c.

democracy's the one i haven't read, guess i'm doing that this year

... as the granddaughter of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house in my own particular Welbeck Street I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know, is technique.

dope

"birds exploded in the air"

Still haunts me

Basically in agreement with the thread consensus here on her earlier work having some reactionary and conservative impulses in it but it's not mentioned enough how much her later writing goes totally against that - imagine any conservative writer covering the Central Park Five the way she did.

Much like with my Midwestern cousin who lives in Santa Monica, I attribute at least some of the "conservativism" to where Joan lived (and, in her case, when).

Ross Douthat's column in the NY Times today is about the conservative (small-c) side of Didion, and argues that the early stuff is the best:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/joan-didion-conservative.html

Columns very much in character.

Much like with my Midwestern cousin who lives in Santa Monica, I attribute at least some of the "conservativism" to where Joan lived (and, in her case, when).

― Max Hamburgers (Eric H.), Wednesday, January 5, 2022 4:15 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

like 80% of this country has always been and will always be small-c conservative, we're a settler colonial state. light lol at the impulse to handwave it though, like she's a beloved aunt. i guarantee joan didion didn't care anything about you and i or anyone with less power than a school board member.

i didn't mean to pick on you, eric, sorry. i should just avoid this thread tbh.

If revering Didion despite (or, really, outside of) politics is cause for me to be picked on, pick away.

One more essay on the inadequacies of Didion.

The result of Lakewood’s economic collapse, according to Didion, was a generation of youth with no prospects whose blind rage, pent up and convected, exploded into the shameful spectacle of the Spur Posse, a vile pack of Lakewood High troglodytes who achieved nationwide notoriety for their sexual abuse of girls as young as ten, getting in fights, dealing drugs, committing burglaries, setting off a pipe bomb on someone’s front porch, etc. (and later, angling to get paid to tell their ugly tales on ugly television shows like “NightTalk with Jane Whitney” and “Jerry Springer.”)

“Trouble in Lakewood” is about ten thousand times better than “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”—better researched and thought out, better observed and better written. The latter piece draws a frankly kind of unbelievable portrait of dumb, unwashed hippies who fed acid to their five-year-old kid and spent the whole day eight miles high, responding to most of the author’s questions with “Wow.” God knows how Didion found people quite as messed-up as these. I am a Seventies kid myself and I am here to tell you that people got high a lot back then, but I never even heard of anyone getting as wasted as Didion’s hippies do, outside of underground comix. It’s incredible that all of them didn’t just die in a big heap from all that acid and meth… okay, one of them lands in the hospital with pneumonia.

In any case both essays, written thirty years apart, are getting at roughly the same thing, namely that the American Dream is a myth and a fraud because the tough pioneer spirit that animated Didion’s own ancestors, and also John Wayne, is dead; and now these gross, unworthy new people, such as hippies and illiterate mall-shopping Lakewood matrons, deserve what they get—more or less.

Didion’s work is an unrelenting exercise in class superiority, and it will soon be as unendurable as a minstrel show. It is the calf-bound, gilt-edged bible of neoliberal meritocracy. The weirdest thing about it is that this dyed-in-the-wool conservative woman (she started her career at the National Review) somehow became the irreproachable darling of New York media and stayed that way for decades, all on the strength of a dry, self-regarding prose style and a “glamor shot” with a Corvette. The toast of Broadway and the face of Céline, decorated by Barack Obama himself, Didion is the mascot of the 20th century’s ruling class (both “liberal” and “conservative”)—that is, people who “went to a good school” and know how to ski and what kind of wine to order, and thus believe themselves entitled to be in charge of your life and mine, and just… planet Earth. Almost every college-educated person in the United States d’un certain âge (that’s the kind of phrase we liked to use) is to some degree responsible for this, insofar as we accepted it—or did, maybe, until 2016, when the failures of the “meritocracy” finally came home to roost. Or not roost, rather, so much as attack like we were Tippi Hedren.

https://popula.com/2018/10/15/the-center-held-just-fine/

“Trouble in Lakewood” is about ten thousand times better than “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”

A child wrote this sentence.

i mean we all have our icons. i've spent a lot of time lately reevaluating mine, which becomes oversharing and/or overstepping too easily for me.

xp and that graph expresses it well. behind all of the well-observed detail is, frankly, a poor understanding of what motivates and animates people, beyond the quest for power. also, no offense to brad, but the quote above about the hills being a manifestations of stress is garbage imo, really reveals a fundamental lack of interest in what animates the earth beyond it being, again, a reflection of ms. didion's own anxiety.

xp ok, i will definitely pick on that shitty aristocratic myopic little style nitpick sniffing attitude, fuck that shit lol

wow from mild to wild in one post. need to bow out of posting here obv, but i appreciate seeing critiques posted itt.

One more essay on the inadequacies of Didion.

i got mad at this essay at the time because maria bustillos fucking sucks

the quote above about the hills being a manifestations of stress is garbage imo, really reveals a fundamental lack of interest in what animates the earth beyond it being, again, a reflection of ms. didion's own anxiety.

huh i thought it a well-poised analogy about thought vs. style but ok be an asshole

mute joan didion on twitter and fucking spare us

you've already decided how you feel about her and you're contorting her work to your decision, which is fine, we all do it, but it's like i can't even fucking appreciate how democracy is written

forgive me if i especially don't take the bustillos takedown seriously if it's published on bitcoin-powered content farm

fuck, god, who cares, i'll think again before posting itt

I'm not sure I want to stop admiring really good sentences because of shortcomings in the politics of the people who wrote the sentences.

Like, it never occurred to me to view Joan Didion as a paragon of how to live or how to be or what to believe about stuff. She was a person who sold sentences. They were really good sentences. I like good sentences, and I had money, so I bought them. I have never needed to agree or disagree with her about anything. I gave her some money and she gave me some words. Win-win.

Similarly John Lennon is a person who sold noises. I like a lot of his noises, so I bought them. That doesn't imply endorsement of everything he thought and did and was. It's a transaction and we both came out all right as a result of that transaction. He got money and I got noises.

ms. didion

Joan if you're feelin' nasty

That kind of aristocratically cavalier carriage has no place in a future world that will regard Didion as a minstrel.

i would question the contention that a pov appreciating an analogy didion made is the one that's unwelcome in this thread.

also curious who "us" is and what exactly they should be spared of, and why.

xp what makes really good sentences? what are the limits of style? when can function be criticized if form is so apparently valuable?

as far as value goes, this is very revealing imo:

Like, it never occurred to me to view Joan Didion as a paragon of how to live or how to be or what to believe about stuff. She was a person who sold sentences. They were really good sentences. I like good sentences, and I had money, so I bought them. I have never needed to agree or disagree with her about anything. I gave her some money and she gave me some words. Win-win.

xp lol to alfred

I'm not sure I want to stop admiring really good sentences because of shortcomings in the politics of the people who wrote the sentences.

see also: Alfred, on Scalia

If I ever expressed admiration for that poisonous fuckwit's prose, I must've been two gin and tonics in.

You asked the bartender for another jiggery pokery.

(It sounds like her essays and other writings are due for rereading (with an open mind outside labels).)

ok, for one thing, i was quoting from one of her novels, democracy, which i just started reading, which in its second chapter immediately scales back to reveal the author (identified as joan didion but as everyone knows all postmodern author reveals are extremely suspect) and all of the novels she didn't write about the characters (and their extensive family histories) to clarify what the novel is/has been reduced to instead. part of this involved analyzing her own process, and how the novel was suggesting itself through environments and images more than people (very similar to how a book of common prayer begins with the literal immateriality of the landscape it takes place in). one may balk at the very device, i get it, but she is not mistaking landmasses for stress, ffs, she is deliberately connecting them to the process of writing the novel, which, idk, doesn't evince a lack of interest at all to me (and it feels disingenuous to me to suggest didion wasn't interested in this, but you seem to know her motivations better than i do), the metaphor and the meaning are shoring each other up. i think she was particularly good at doing this without ever getting overwrought or obvious about it, and that's why many of her sentences are good

again there's the freeway scene in play it as it lays and so much is going on just in the description of driving in california that refracts through the particular nervous breakdown her character is going through. it's not minimalism but it's the kind of restraint that speaks volumes. you can call this a lack of content i guess or one of her characteristic instances of not knowing what anyone is thinking or feeling ever but i don't think that's the case

didion and i don't align politically at all but neither do i with thomas mann so it's just a meaningless distinction. good writing is a product of curiosity breaking through into understanding. in books like miami she does that. in certain essays she totally fails

maria bustillos wrote an essay about pick-up artists for the awl that makes her look very bad, and on a rhetorical level she sucks shit compared to joan didion. her house is shattered glass. i'm with eric

mute joan didion on twitter and fucking spare us

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, 5 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZQaLmme-eg

fuck off xyz

thanks for filling in the context there, brad, i see what you're saying now. i do think she was singularly good at conveying a feeling, a kind of vertigo, related to being in the modern world and, idk, the feeling of alienation that comes from it, from not being able to do anything about it. i realize this is a personal comparison and ymmv as far as how it holds up, but i was into joan didion and radiohead at the same time in my life and for similar reasons. and youn is otm, i'm giving diminishing returns here by not actually reading or revisiting the work.

(does anyone not sell anything and how can you know that they are not?)

one of her characteristic instances of not knowing what anyone is thinking or feeling ever

One of the reasons people find Didion compelling is that she not only knew this, she was willing to say it out loud. Relatively few writers/artists/intellectuals have straight up informed us that they have no fucking clue what's going on, and yet still have interesting things to say.

In her case it is on page 11 of The White Album. Literally on the first page of the first essay in one of her most well-known books, she reveals that she's utterly lost. The mere fact that so many people kept reading, past that page, is a testament to her skill - whether as a prose stylist, or as a chronicler of an age, a place, a time, a sensibility, a cultural milieu.

xp to youn that is a point for sure, everyone is hustling to a degree, but i tend to be more sympathetic when the author acknowledges it and uses it as a bridge to the reader. there's something related to the mystique around form in abstract expressionism in didion and how she talks about her style. i think one could be uncharitable towards abstract expressionist artists like rothko and pollack for reasons that feel similar to how one can look for limitations with didion.

it never occurred to me to view Joan Didion as a paragon of how to live or how to be or what to believe about stuff.

this is me. it's possible to appreciate her style and to find value in some fraction of her accumulated thoughts without treating her as a beacon illuminating the righteous path

All of this guarantees that if Bret Easton Ellis passes before I do I’ll need to avoid social media for a good solid two months.

Thomas Mann is a good comparison: an essentially conservative spirit, a 19th century burgher marooned in Weimar and Nazi Germany, who confronted his conservatism with evermore fantastical subjects for books.

fuck off xyz

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, 5 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

fuck, god, who cares, i'll think again before posting itt

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, 5 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

J.S. Bach's politics were probably pretty shitty but Brandendburg #4 is a bop

I remember the driving scene perhaps through pop culture references of which those in academia appear to believe one ought to be ashamed but perhaps also through the desperation of typically being able to rely on someone else to drive and the endless CA freeways and unexpected traffic and apparently kind-spirited sheriffs in central CA who encounter drivers in the middle of the night and the weird way CA seems to occupy many points of its history in space.

!

i know i am kip to an annoying level but this thread revive has been a bummer in the wake of her death, that the only discussion was excavations of her “small c conservatism”

like, really?
“RIP Thomas Hardy its sad that he only wrote about farms”

i was hoping for celebration of her or gain some more insight or i dunno.

not that the current discussion isn’t interesting or worthwhile, or that the purpose of ilx is to entertain me. idk.

as you were

Wait til you see the shit that's been dredged up in the Betty White thread.

:(

I hear you VegemiteGrrl. When she died I went to the shelf to go find my favorite passage but couldn't decide. Like, her body of work is world-class in the aggregate. But any given sentence doesn't really convey the overall quality when taken out of context. There's a bit about "an extravagance of orchids" and the "birds exploded in the air" which I think both come from the Malibu essay, but neither would be impressive on its own. Miami also has some fine dry writing in it, but only when viewed within the thread of the prose.

"like, really?
“RIP Thomas Hardy its sad that he only wrote about farms”"

Is writing about farms by definition conservative or something?

no i just meant myopically reducing a writers output to one thing

Lol no. Hardy wrote novels about people in his time. But we are talking about (mostly) Didion's non-fiction.

And Didion's politics otoh could make her non-fiction unreadable if she looks at people the way bustillos says she does. Saying "but her sentences" is a get out clause for fiction some of the time, less so for non-fiction.

I also don't see how Bustillos being a worse stylist (or the platform they got their essay published in lol) invalidates their readings. It's just putting Didion on a pedestal and not dealing with what they say.

I couldn't take Bustillos seriously after, like so many people with hot takes, she omits discussing Salvador, Miami, After Henry, and Political Fictions, all examples of reporting which by its nature observes and -- what most reporters don't do because American j-school practices are still shit -- judges.

She does mention The Year of Magical Thinking because, whaddya know, it's a memoir, hence a sign of her insularity.

I'll repeat: Didion stopped being that Californian diarist in the 1980s. She engaged the world. She criticized the Reagan-Bush year's heinous foreign policy in Central America -- she wrote a book about the El Mozote massacre when the Beltway press was fawning over Reagan's syntactical lapses.

I can accept -- hell, I would accept payment to write -- a critique of her work in its totality, not specious bullshit that stops with The White Album and her fiction.

I guess Bustillos excoriated 1993's “Trouble in Lakewood,” which I haven't read in years, but from what I remember she draws the wrong conclusions.

Brad is otm about Bustillos’s critique of Didion. I’m not saying her politics don’t merit critique, but Bustillos performs a very weird reading of “Trouble in Lakewood.” I also just think Didion is tricky, politically speaking, particularly when she overtly starts covering American electoral politics.

i'm sure there are persuasive critiques of joan didion out there, i'm not an uncritical admirer, but that maria bustillos essay is not good. i mean:

Didion’s work is an unrelenting exercise in class superiority, and it will soon be as unendurable as a minstrel show.

i mean, this is profoundly more offensive than anything i've ever seen joan didion write! and i'm not sure if bustillos meant this to be facetious or not, but wtf at this:

I never even heard of anyone getting as wasted as Didion’s hippies do.

I don't concur with the view that the Joan Didion thread should only be about celebrating Joan Didion because the writer died last month. The thread has been going since 2007, and was initially composed of statements reposted from 2006 -- that is, ILB has been talking about Didion for years and years, and (if anyone can be bothered to go back and read it) 'we' were ambivalent, divided, etc, then, as 'we' are now.

The fact that this thread keeps coming back is, for me, consonant with how I happen to feel about her, namely: however much I sometimes dislike her, am frustrated or disappointed about her, I can never quite put her away and dismiss her. She has an uncanny capacity to stay the course as an item of reflection. In a sense that is my primary experience of Didion - an interest that never goes away.

I think the statement, often repeated, that 'she wrote very good sentences', is overstated. She wrote in a particular way. I am still not convinced that she was much better at writing than most other writers. And there are some other writers who write in more ambitious or flamboyant ways (Nabokov would be the extreme, but even ILB darling Patricia Lockwood would qualify in her own way) whose 'sentences' might be of more interest to consider as such.

I don't really agree with the idea that you buy Didion's 'sentences' and ignore what they say, or the views they express. The sentences, the content, the views, go together. There are probably talented writers in the Spectator (well ... maybe), but I wouldn't buy them. The analogy with music doesn't hold up very well because compared to language, musical is a relatively abstract medium.

I agree with the view that the later Didion (c.1980s, 1990s) is probably politically different from the earlier. I've been saying it over and over!

In the critiques of Didion, I find the idea of 'class status' strangely overplayed - that has never been an issue in her for me, really - and I also think that the idea that she is 'nostalgic for a golden age of better values' is very overstated or not very apt. (Both Harrison and Bustillos seem to emphasise both these ideas; I'm not very convinced by them.) I see little nostalgia in her -- again, an unusually unsentimental writer.

I can't believe I was so hard on poor old Joan.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Well put.

I think she wrote good sentences in that she was unsentimental but evoked sentiment in the reader, in her novels and essays and articles.

more like groan didion

more like joan didifart

the pinefox: Is it possible that you don't recognize the markers of class in CA where money is new and a recent history is tied to land and frontier stories? Not that I know myself but the markers are interesting ...

and she’s explicit about them! anyone who wants to make a performance of like pulling back the curtain to reveal that author of Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album writes from the perspective of “establishment” California and about politics (both left and right) with both privileged fascination and privileged contempt is a priori suspect given that she comes out and says this repeatedly.

obv she gets older, sees more, comes to a different kind of understanding about what’s at stake and for whom. we haven’t mentioned Salvador in this context but it’s a moment for sure.

I think the motives of the seller were being questioned rather than the aptitude of the buyer or the existence of buyers who do not also consider quality and purpose.

I agree that music is a relatively abstract medium, but popular music is often written with lyrics intended not to be abstract and that is what is often discussed here. I think good writing can evoke response that is non-literal.

re: Didion's famous exchange with the Woody Allen fan, I don't like her response, though I also think the film is bad. My question is: has anyone read her actual review? Could anyone post it here?

OK, the review is here
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/08/16/letter-from-manhattan/

But much of it is subscriber-only.

From reading the first paras I'm somewhat entertained but not very convinced, as the critique seems rather applicable to Didion herself. Maybe she was, for this reason, the ideal reviewer.

the critique seems rather applicable to Didion herself

I don't know if I agree here! I also only have access to these opening paragraphs, but reading them over her accusations are: cultural accesorising (an interesting one as arguably much of our culture has become this!), infantilism and self-obsession. Out of those three the only sin I could see someone saying Didion has is the last one, but even there the very nature of her work means she is constantly confronted with things that are alien to her and requiring at least some curiosity to analyse, while Allen's world, being fiction, can afford to be more insular.

Nedlene Grendel: random guess - they don't want to explain themselves for doing something that cannot be justified to their audience for technical reasons only that point to skills appropriate for contests of dominance

Will give this a listen

For your listening pleasure, here's our deep-dive on Joan Didion's conservatism—her Sacramento roots, her early writing for National Review, why she loved Barry Goldwater (and hated Ronald Reagan), and much more. Our guest? The great Sam Tanenhaus. Enjoy!https://t.co/04u8xopsb2

— Matthew Sitman (@MatthewSitman) January 13, 2022

really enjoyed that

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.