Review

This review was published on Goodreads.

I wonder if Joan Didion ever expressed regret, or should I phrase more directly, guilt, over the pieces she had written. America’s most elusive culture pundit, the New Journalism pioneer, the “neurotically inarticulate” writer with her chic Stingray Corvette and the smoldering cigarette she wielded in her right hand and her left hand tucked securely underneath, casual yet coolly judgmental, removed from the ensemble - and her eyes. Unflinching, distant, mildly interested, she vivisected her audience and her subjects with the trained dexterity of a surgeon, a quiet reminder that even though submitting to the camera means she must relinquish control to the voyeurs, it is them who are being observed; the narrative is in her hands. It was the first time I recognized the Mona Lisa stare outside of the artwork from which the term originated. The iconic Joan Didion pose.

I said wonder, since the enigma of Joan Didion is unresolved and is destined to forever be unresolved - she passed away just before Christmas 2021. Generations of writers indebted and empowered by her formed a deluge of obituaries and tributes that washed all over the US press: New Yorker published not one, but two (possibly more? I only found two) mesmerizing op-ed columns on Didion’s legacy, and Debbie Miller of “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” revealed what became of her and her family after the events of the essay (She’s a retired educator). The Year Of Magical Thinking propelled to the top of the New York Times Bestseller in the aftermath, and an auction of her possessions last December priced $27000 in full 2022 freedom eagles for a pair of certified Didion sunglasses. Despite extensive coverage, the mystery would not yield, but by that point there had been an implicit consensus that all of us must know better than to keep being vexed. Joan Didion’s entire career was built upon exposés of the human psyche; she drew red circles around her country’s sins, forced a reckoning. In the frenzy to uncover what was it that the author hid under her sunglasses, we had inadvertently exposed ourselves.

So there I was two weeks ago, searching for Didion. Until then I had known her by name only: did a Vogue, wrote about American culture, probably donned the Anna Wintour look before Anna Wintour was a thing, and is a contemporary of Susan Sontag, whom I had come into proximity with during a Philosophy class (tangent: a friend once told me that affinity for philosophy is often the manifest symptom of literature addiction. Go figure.) She wrote The Year of Magical Thinking, a widely read account of grief and one I should have finished reading last year, but then the infamous slump ensnared me for months and I am still in recovery - so I decided, what better than to start with her first essay collection for rehabilitation. Fantastic title, if I may add.

What did I find? Myself, yes, but writing obsessively about oneself in a book review reeks of lovebombing, narcissism, emotional immaturity, and general irony in the context of a Didion book. So let’s talk about something else.

New Journalism was a movement that originated in the United States from the 1960s until the late 1970s. You might be familiar with its legacy if you have ever been a magazine op-ed enjoyer; I’m talking about New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Times, the big guns. Indeed the movement was started and sustained by magazine writers, who were faced with the unique challenge of writing about widely publicized events while struggling to distinguish their works from newspaper reporting and keep readers engaged until the very end. There was also a counterculture angle to it as well: by the 1960s, doubt had been raised over traditional journalism’s ability to convey truth, or to be more critical, the assertions of impartiality had faltered and the personal element had become clearer than ever. Luckily, the spacious layout of magazines allowed writers to be more indulgent with their sleight of hand, and so out of coffee tables bore a new movement, one that made no attempt to hide the author’s involvement, and blurred the line between nonfiction and traditional fiction writing: first-person perspectives, characterization, vivid description of context and settings, what I dub as “verbal interior set design,” plot building complete with tension building and a satisfying climax. It was a movement that was upfront about its desire to keep its audience engaged, even at the cost of disfiguring reality. Fiercely contentious, yes, borderline blasphemous to traditional journalism, debatable; but at least one knows they are not here for honest-to-goodness fact reporting. They are here for the drama of it all. (note: do your own research on this one. I only write how I understand it, which is to say I regurgitate what I read on Wikipedia.)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was one of New Journalism’s finest works, and it would be no trouble at all to reconcile Joan Didion the status symbol with Joan Didion the raconteur and journalist. Her essays varied in length, but everything was trimmed and lean; the essay would only be as long as it needs to, and no more. There is a sly sense of humor that permeates the book, as if the author had a metaphorical third eye that hovered above every setting and every conversation, juxtaposing them on top of each other until a contradiction jumped out, and there it was, the punchline. Take, for example, this wicked line in “Where The Kissing Never Stops” for Joan Baez:

She had a great natural style, and she is what used to be called a lady. “Scum,” hissed an old man with a snap-on bow tie who had identified himself as “a veteran of two wars” and who is a regular at such meetings.

Or this hilarious brief exchange that relied almost exclusively on subtext:

I take off my dark glasses so he can see my eyes. He leaves his on.

“How much you get paid for doing this kind of media poisoning?” he says for openers.

I put my dark glasses back on.

Part of the allure is how expertly Didion intellectually exposed herself while keeping her heart sealed off from prying eyes. I could laugh or squint at her writing, but the prose was fluid enough in its interpretation that it could have meant anything. “Some Dreamers of the Golden Land” is at times a fictionalized account of a suburban noir mystery, a meditation on false promises a la the American Dream, and a stern warning for the black-winged Icaruses of the world. By blending into the setting, she allowed her audience to explore the landscape themselves. I get a feeling that this was not born out of a desire to uphold “the traditional journalism tradition,” but simply a byproduct of being too informed of the human psyche. Joan Didion specifically quoted this line from Joan Baez: “ ‘The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people,’ she said. ‘The hardest is with one.’ “ As with any other Didion essays in this book, the quote could have easily slipped our radar, had we not known that everything that ever went on the page was intentional.

In many ways, this is an account of her own sentiment towards Californian hippie culture in the 1960s, and the sentiment in question is made clear by the very first sentence in her titular essay: “The center was not holding.” This book is a product of anxiety and anticipation, prophesy of a society on its last legs. Hindsight, however, is 20/20 and now that it’s 2023, we know that it didn’t fall apart, or at least not in the way Didion imagined it to be. Americans tend to downplay their influence in this pivotal period; Kurt Vonnegut reflected on his career in a distinctly despondent tone: “During the Vietnam War… every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.” Asking a Vietnamese, however, and they may tell you a different story. Hippie culture would later be recontextualized as a period of confusion, where people with a heart but no direction would flock to. It would play a role, insignificant as it might seem, in ending the dirty war that has ravaged Vietnam for two decades. Joan Didion must have realized that her account of the hippie culture was not holistic and the Haight-Ashbury district was not representative, as she later said on a podcast later on: “That piece is a blank for me still.” However, this was not in any way a failed collection. Her insights about human behavior has aged gracefully, and it is precisely within those insights that readers must face themselves. I distinctly remembered reading her preface when her sentence suddenly hit me point-blank:

Writers are always selling somebody out.

I considered throwing away the pen altogether. I had just returned to writing, mostly as an outlet for my internal dialogue, and the last thing I needed was a reminder of why I dropped the habit in the first place. It simply isn’t even my passion nor my expertise. Hence the questions at the beginning of this whatever-the-hell-it-is. For someone who spoke so critically of her habit (cue Why I Write), it was astonishing that she kept writing at all, let alone for decades after. That, however, was the key moment for me, my biggest takeaway, that which is called defiance. It is an ode to people who could never shut the fuck up, those who could never shake the feelings of guilt with every word they put on the page. Should she have stopped writing? Maybe. Did she? No.

Live with the guilt. Maybe.

Sources

  • Britannica, New Journalism (American literary movement)
  • Tom Wolfe, “Why They Aren’t Writing the Great American Novel Anymore” (this is a long read)
  • Los Angeles Times, “Op-Ed: I thought Joan Didion’s essay would ruin my life. But something else happened”
  • New York Times Bestseller, Paperback Nonfiction, January 16, 2022
  • New Yorker, “The Radicalization of Joan Didion”
  • New Yorker, “ Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking”
  • Los Angeles Times, “Joan Didion estate sale: See which items sold for big bucks”
  • Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”
  • C. Kraus, “On Hurting People’s Feelings: Journalism, Guilt, and Autobiography”