Didion’s dissonant details

Is Joan Didion always writing about Joan Didion?

I own a copy of After Henry, Joan Didion’s 1992 essay collection for two reasons. The first is a growing interest in her work. It started with reading My Year of Magical Thinking in a moment when I was thinking about mourning. Then I discovered “On Keeping a Notebook” and tried the rest of the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Soon after that, I found it necessary to read The White Album. A few weeks of listening to 24 hours Tracy Daugherty’s Didion biography, The Last Love Song. By the end of it I was hooked.

The second reason is the original owner’s inscription on the end paper which reads in part, “I bought this book because of the shape.” This book once belonged to a fellow book forager. Shape is second only to “interesting layout” when it comes to buying random books as far as I’m concerned.

Joan Didion was drawn to the single object that reveals a truth in a scene. If writing is a game of I Spy, she was our champion. She described herself as obsessed with things on the periphery. This was unusual since good writing tends to focus on action or people.

My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. (Why I Write)

In essay after essay, Didion described dissonant details, cracks in the matrix.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a 1967 essay about San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury at its drug-fueled hippie height, she closed with Susan, a five-year-old on acid. “She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is she’s wearing white lipstick.”

In “The Girl of the Golden West,” Didion wrote about Patty Hearst’s 1975 kidnapping by and eventual collaboration with the Symbian Liberation Army. Over the course of eight months, from February until September, Hearst’s parents spoke to the press from their front step. Didion didn’t mention the parents words or describe their facial language. She saw plants.

...the potted flowers on the steps changing with the seasons, domestic upkeep intact in the face of crisis: azaleas, fuchsias, then cymbidium orchids massed for Easter. (After Henry, 97)

For “Pacific Distances,” she visited nuclear power plant on the University of California Berkeley’s campus. Walking around the reactor pool with a radiation measuring dosimeter in her pocket, she had difficulty not staring at the glowing radioactive core. Still, she noticed a fishing pole and a rubber duck. Chief reactor operator Harry Braun (she used his first and last name both times she refers to him) used the duck to monitor water movement around the shimmering fuel rods. 

“Or when the little children come on school tours,” he added. “Sometimes they don’t pay attention until we put the duck in the pool.” (After Henry, 121)

Time and time again, Didion offered the reader an incongruous detail and moved on. Her observations confronted the reader with contrasts, with objects and moments that suggested a problem with the dominant narrative.

These moments are a characteristic about Didion’s writing that I can isolate, describe, and study. Some paper flags sticking out of my After Henri are labeled “Didion detail” and “Didion moment.” 

It took intentional reading to find identify those moments and to figure out what they were doing in the texts, how they changed everything that came before and after. While I celebrated my minor literary victory of observation, it occurred to me that perhaps Joan Didion is always writing about Joan Didion. This in the sense that she seemed to be writing to and through herself. Writing to understand herself, not matter the context.

All writers write about themselves, but the cohesive factor in Joan Didion’s writing is Joan Didion. There’s a sense of a friend catching your eye across a room full of people, letting you know that she knows that you know that she knows. Perhaps is a sense of intimacy with the reader, the feeling like between you and me, this is not the thing everyone thinks it is.

The cross stitch quote is from her essay Why I Write is, "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means." Put it on a pillow, frame it for your library, you’ll find it everywhere. It means Joan Didion wrote to understand the world. Not to share the world with other people, not to share her experience of the world with the reader, but to figure out what the world and her experience in it meant to her. 

If I’m correct and she’s always writing about herself, though, is it possible that the thing she is always trying to understand is herself? In other words, is she the only one who notices a dissonance between potential nuclear disaster and rubber ducks as teaching tools? Did anyone else pay attention to the flowers? This suggests an existential project.  

With this in mind, I returned to the first essay in the collection, “After Henry,” her ode to her deceased editor.

She starts in the summer of 1966, the season when she met Henry Robbins. She was, “living in a borrowed house in Brentwood” with a newborn and her husband. Their income from April through July was $311. Her daybook held laundry lists and lists of baby gifts. There was no Henry Robbins. 

This was my life, the text says, and then entered Henry Robbins, quietly. 

Next, she shifted to poetry which she often did. She mentions Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Childhood is the Kingdom where Nobody Dies.” The first lines, not included in the essay, read:

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

The poem frames childhood as a time of innocence, a time when the pain of loss is something we are not required to and cannot understand. That childhood ends when we learn that people precious to us are mortal, that they may one day no longer be there. Adulthood, is different. “To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died.” 

Didion’s structure in the following paragraphs followed the poem’s, describing the bliss of ignorance before arriving at painful knowledge.

I believed, by way of contemplating the future, that we would all be around for one another’s funerals. I was wrong. I had failed to imagine, I had not understood. Here was the way it was going to be: I would be around for Henry’s funeral, but he was not going to be around for mine.” (After Henry 18)

The time before Henry’s death was childhood. His death marked her growing up or rather, signaled the end of her childhood. Didion was 45 years old.

In the context of a friend’s death, it’s not surprising people would write about themselves. After all, the deceased is gone, their story ended. But the living must go on. They must continue their lives with a new pain. We don’t cry because a person is gone, we cry because we will miss them. We cry for ourselves.

What makes Didion’s emotional exploration interesting here is the fact that she digs so deep. Thoughts the loss of her editor turned into reflections on writers.

Writer are rarely likeable. They bring nothing to the party, leave their game at the typewriter. They fear their contribution to the general welfare to be evanescent, even doubtful… (After Henry 21)

She wandered far from the Robbins in life or death here. It’s like talking about the biology of cancer instead of the qualities that a person exhibited living with it. It’s missing the point, unless Didion is writing about herself. 

In a 1978 Paris Review interview, Didion says that she was her own only reader. “I am always writing to myself” (Paris Review). Perhaps Didion was always writing about herself to herself.

These are musings, paths into the bigger question “Why am I still reading Joan Didion?” What is it about her work that grabs my attention, draws me back into her words, try to learn from her writing? And it’s interesting to think about in a moment when when so much of writing is about considering your audience, narrowing them down, figuring out who that person is down to the smallest detail (UX for authors). 

Didion didn’t have an area of special interest, unless we count a California that was fading in front of her. So if I read Didion, it isn’t because I’m interested in what she’s writing about as much as I’m trying to learn something about her and how she uses words on a page. 

When I was listening to The Last Love Song, I realized how closely intertwined Didion and her work were. Perhaps I just hope Joan Didion was writing about herself because I want so badly to understand who she was, because I want her writing to tell me something about myself. 

This week, I’m participating in Petya K Grady’s Joan Didion Group Project. There are a few of us, so now that I’ve finished my little contribution, it’s time to go find more and learn!!