Let Me Tell You What Joan Didion Meant
The Second Story In An Impromptu Series Of Portraits
American icon, novelist and screenplay writer, journalist (awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2012 by President Barack Obama), cartographer of grief, (almost) clairvoyant, cold Coca-Cola drinker, and rare bird, Joan Didion was born on December 5th, 1934, in Sacramento, California. Her career started at Vogue after winning an essay contest. Her first novel, Run River, was published in 1963.
In her first essay for Vogue magazine, Self-Respect Its Source, Its Power, she wrote:
“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve. They display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues. Character, the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life, is the source from which self-respect springs.”
I bought my first Joan Didion book in Romania while being enrolled — or planning to be enrolled — in the Journalism faculty. As someone who never had a plan B to fall back on (which speaks volumes, but maybe not precisely about my passion for the written media), her appeal to me was clear — a legendary journalist, a prophet (with honour even in her own country) — a Hunter S. Thompsons in Celine sunglasses. Minus the guns. And the drugs. At the time, she turned out to be more myth than reality, more American than universal, and I ended up losing the book without reading it.
I rediscovered her years later, reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and went on a spree. Just like Susan Sontag, she was a born Californian. Although she spent most of her life in the Golden State, she moved to New York in 1988 and became emblematically linked to the city (thus ticking all the boxes of my geographical obsessions). After her death, I bought Let Me Tell You What I Mean (her sunglasses were already taken), and I recently got South And West as a birthday present. I am probably about to go on another spree.
In 1964 Didion married fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she affectionately described as a “hothead”. The couple soon moved to Malibu, Los Angeles, to pursue success and fortune as Hollywood screenwriters, not unlike Dorothy Parker and Scott F. Fitzgerald. They did and did not succeed, as this article in The New York Times explains.
In 1966, the couple adopted a daughter and named her Quintana Roo, after a region in the Yucatan Peninsula. Terrified that something might happen to their unchristened child, John, an Irish Catholic, baptised her in the sink at home.
There sure was a lot more going on. Filtering the information for this story was overwhelming. And not (just) because I struggle with brevity.
In 2017 her life, career, and struggles made it into a Netflix documentary. Directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne, the documentary is titled The Center Will Not Hold — paraphrasing the opening sentence of what might be Didion’s finest work of social criticism, the essay on the 1960s counterculture, Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. … Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, slouching off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins.”
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a piece on the San Francisco hippies. The title is a verse from William Butler Yeats’s poem — The Second Coming. With a sharper pen and an even sharper sense of observation, Didion X-rays the American society with surgical precision. She talks about Susan, who is five years old and drops acid. Asked — in the documentary — how she felt seeing the child, she answered: “It was gold. You live for moments like that if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem is, by far, not a piece of traditional journalism. It is, in fact, one of the best examples of the newly emerged style called New Journalism, a meeting point of literary talent and journalistic flair.
In 1968, under the same title, she gathered a series of essays (journalistic pieces and personal recollections) on 1960s California. The collection includes pieces on John Wayne (Didion had a crush on him), Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Non-Violence in the Carmel Valley, and the legendary movie producer and Hollywood pioneer Howard Hughes. Didion captures the decade in all its instability and brutality. Her diagnosis is blunt, without judgment or prejudice.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean And Why I Write Or A Journalist Of The Counterculture
Joan Didion is considered, alongside Norman Mailer, Hunter S Thompson and Truman Capote, one of the pioneers of New Journalism.
New Journalism (also immersion journalism) refers to a shift in perspective and style, a new way of storytelling in which the reporting paradigm of who-what-where-when-why-how is replaced by immersive observation. While Thompson brilliantly did, with gonzo, what every school of journalism tells you not to do — making yourself the story — Didion kept a more detached perspective. Her writing style is elegant, clear and clean. Just like Thompson, she admired Ernest Hemingway. She credited him with teaching her “how sentences worked”.
The collection of essays titled Let Me Tell You What I Mean, published in 2021, gathers pieces explaining how she found her style and vernacular voice, becoming the iconic chronicler of American society. The Guardian calls Let Me Tell You What I Mean a masterclass in minimalism. In the opening essay titled Alicia And The Underground Press, she writes about “the inability” and the failure of the American written media to “get through” and “to speak to one another in a direct way”. The piece is a criticism of the traditional media and a semi-ironic and hilarious apology of the 1968 underground press, whose geniality resides in the ability to talk directly to the reader (without providing much information — “I have never read anything I needed to know in an underground paper”).
The War Correspondence In El Salvador Or Understanding The Mechanisms Of Terror
In 1982 Didion went to report on the civil war in El Salvador — a gory and messy conflict in a country with a long tradition of social injustice, with most of the population living impoverished for decades. When she arrived, she found a country littered with mutilated corpses.
The Salvadoran civil war started with a failed coup in 1979. The war lasted for 12 years. In the essay El Salvador, Didion explains the dynamics between various organisations, Guerilla fighters backed by Cuba and The Soviet Union and the civilian-military dictatorship backed by the US (the Carter and — especially — Reagan administrations). The US-backed government (Revolutionary Government Junta of El Salvador — Spanish: Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno, JRG) is considered responsible for 85% of the atrocities committed during the conflict).
Asked by her nephew in the documentary if it was not a dangerous place to be, she smiles, asks incredulously, “El Salvador?” and then proceeds to answer by saying that it was one of the most dangerous places one could HOPE to be.
At the beginning of the essay, she talks about how she understood the El Salvador mechanisms of terror. Later on, she elaborates, recalling how she was with her husband one evening, and she spotted two silhouettes in the vicinity, one of which was carrying a gun. Didion and her husband were the only people around. She identifies the foundation of the mechanisms of terror in how threatened, silenced and humiliated she felt that night.
The book-length essay El Salvador published in 1983 is an impeccable piece of war journalism, combining non-immersive observation (of battlefields and body dumps) with accurate political and conflict analysis. Didion keeps a firm position on the United States’ foreign policy and their support of the brutal Salvadoran government.
The Stories She Told Herself When Her Centre Was Not Holding
Differing in perspective from Tolstoy, Didion said that unhappy marriages resemble each other to the extent that it is futile to note the details of each misery. Her marriage was a happy and solid one. In the Netflix documentary, she tells her nephew how much she liked being in a couple and “having somebody there”. She recalls how — while not grasping the meaning of falling in love — she had a clear sense of wanting it to continue after she met John.
The Year Of Magical Thinking
John Gregory Dunne died of a heart attack at 71 on December 30th, 2003, after returning from the hospital, where the couple’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was in an induced coma.
Joan Didion addressed the grief of losing her husband in a book published in October 2005 titled The Year Of Magical Thinking.
“Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
These are the first words Didion wrote after the death of her husband. What follows is, as the title promises, magical thinking by the book.
In her 1979 book, The White Album, Didion wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
In the months following John’s death, she grew convinced that John would come back, and she practiced the purest form of magical bargaining: if I keep his shoes, he will come back — if we sacrifice the virgin, we will have good weather. We might have stopped sacrificing virgins, but this reactive mechanism is still very much present in modern societies. I read my horoscope every time I am sad.
Among the prerequisites of John’s second coming was keeping Quintana alive. It is hard to fathom or describe how heartbreaking this book is. Didion herself explains with sad humour how, when you lose someone, you expect to go crazy with pain and grief. Still, you do not expect to go literally crazy waiting for your dead husband to come back and wrap in towels the child that once was your — now an adult and dying — daughter.
Blue Nights
Quintana Roo Dune died of pancreatitis on August 26th, 2005, at the age of 39. Didion was not able to address the death of her daughter for a long time. When she could, she wrote Blue Nights, published in November 2011.
Blue Nights starts with Quintana’s wedding day on July 26th, 2003, when she wore expensive shoes and a wedding dress, but her hair was in a thick braid, just like when she was a child in Malibu — a memory Didion was very fond of.
“We all survive more than we think we can,” she said. “We have no choice, so we do it.” A phrase repeated throughout the book is “When we talk about mortality, we’re talking about our children.” She means the fear and the responsibility we feel when it comes to our children. The need to protect and keep them secure, and the guilt we feel when we fail. She felt guilty for Quintana’s death. For not seeing how troubled she really was underneath the veneer of charm, for her failure to plan for misfortune, and for her failure to protect her. In the 2017 Netflix documentary, she says: “She was adopted. She had been given to me to take care of, and I failed to do that, so there was a huge guilt.”
In 1989 Joan Didion and Quintana Roo appeared in a GAP ad shot by Annie Leibovitz.
Joan Didion died on December 23rd, 2021, in Manhattan, New York City, New York. She was 87.
More on Joan Didion (and Californian diners and restaurants): Reading Joan Didion in California Restaurants | by Sara Benincasa | Medium
