Althouse: Goodbye to Joan Didion.

December 23, 2021

Goodbye to Joan Didion.

This was a writer I truly admired, so I will give you my “Joan Didion” tag and go back and read what I’ve said about her over the years.

24 comments:

Michael said...: Didion and Babitz in the same week. Fitting. Ironic. The two great chroniclers of Los Angeles ennui. RIP; 12/23/21, 11:39 AM
Joe Smith said...: It's about time she quit writing for that rag...; 12/23/21, 11:56 AM
rcocean said...: Given your previous post about authors and people they write about, here's a Didion quote:

”My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”; 12/23/21, 12:06 PM
Paul Kramer said...: heard years ago that she came from one of the original California families. the Donnor party survivors...; 12/23/21, 12:12 PM
Josephbleau said...: First Eve and now Joan. There are few left left.; 12/23/21, 12:13 PM
Carol said...: Oh dear, they're all dying aren't they. Loved the White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem. All the great serious writers are gone, no?

I've read and learned so much since college, and then since retirement. Come to find out only lately that what I like to read is called literary fiction and literary nonfiction. And they're both quite out of style. Everything is fantasy sci fi fanfic stuff now, which I have little interest in. Too much magic, which comes off as rescue by deus ex machina. Bleah.

The kids on Reddit tell me real life is so bloody awful now, so who wants to read about it.

Who am I to disagree. But that wasn't my experience at all.; 12/23/21, 12:54 PM
Temujin said...: I've not read anything by Joan Didion. At least nothing that I can recall. But I will now that I have All The Time In The World. I suspect she's much better than I suspect. So many great writers, so little time. Even with all the time in the world.; 12/23/21, 1:22 PM
Lem the artificially intelligent said...: Last I remember her for; when it felt like everybody was on the Obama pink cloud, Didion felt "uneasy". Link to an Althouse blog post on the eve of the 2008 election.; 12/23/21, 1:27 PM
Left Bank of the Charles said...: Slouching Towards Bethlehem was a good read. But for all the times California has been going to hell, how come it has never gotten there?; 12/23/21, 1:33 PM
Bilwick said...: Never read her except in snippets, and so can't pass judgment on her writing. I find her interesting as an example of what I call "the Garry Wills Effect"--i. e., where a writer starts off as a conservative (I think she is even mentioned as a promising young conservative writer in M. Stanton Evans' groundbreaking REVOLT ON THE CAMPUS back in the early Sixties); toils in the conservative vineyards, so to speak, with little notice; then switches allegiance and gets noticed by the "liberal" Hive, winning acclaim and with it greater financial rewards. Not saying that was their primary motivation for converting, but that's the way it seems to go. Hard to imagine the Hive clerisy saying, "Hey, look at this writer! True, she's a little too pro-freedom for my taste--but damn, what a stylist!"; 12/23/21, 1:40 PM
tim in vermont said...: carpets the floors of the State Capitol 'in a pleasing shade of green,' Didion writes. (What green carpet, Didion’s deadpan delivery invites us to ask, has ever been 'pleasing'?)

Wasn't Nancy Reagan a redhead? Maybe she just wanted to look good for her hubby.; 12/23/21, 1:54 PM
Howard said...: Her Netflix movie is worth a watch.; 12/23/21, 2:02 PM
Mea Sententia said...: She introduced me to the word phantasmagoria.; 12/23/21, 5:04 PM
tim in vermont said...: "She introduced me to the word phantasmagoria."

That's funny, I learned it from a quote from Karl Marx, I think. Something about "the phantasmagoria of capitalism."; 12/23/21, 5:47 PM
tim in vermont said...: "But for all the times California has been going to hell, how come it has never gotten there?"

If you carefully curate your news, you get to not know what is going on there lately, since the news out of California doesn't seem to fit the progressive narrative all that well. Don't look for the New York Times or the Boston Globe to keep you apprised.; 12/23/21, 5:50 PM
Lurker21 said...: Biden is keeping his promises ... This really is turning out to be a winter of great suffering and death ...

heard years ago that she came from one of the original California families. the Donnor party survivors...

I think they were in the original Donner Party but didn't take the "shortcut" and got to California before the snows. So they were in a sense survivors, but not really Survivors.

She didn't get her second bounce. She grew up believing in California, How the West Was Won, John Wayne, rugged individualism, Goldwater. Then she got jaded and cynical about all that. It would have been good if she'd been able to see through LA/NY cynicism as well, but that was harder to do.; 12/23/21, 6:07 PM
SteveWe said...: For those of you interested in reading her best fiction and non-fiction, you can find "Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s (LOA #325): Run River / Slouching Towards Bethlehem / Play It As It Lays / A Book of Common Prayer / The White Album (Library of America)" on Amazon. I'll remind you about maybe using Ann's link before ordering.

"A Book of Common Prayer" is a masterpiece of observation and style.; 12/23/21, 6:32 PM
Rollo said...: My tribute will be watching Play It As It Lays. I wanted to get it on DVD and couldn't, but I found it on YouTube. Maybe this will become a holiday tradition, but only if the movie is particularly bad.; 12/23/21, 6:55 PM
Jimmy said...: She was a remarkable writer. Started writing by typing out Hemingways stuff, to see how it worked. But in her essays she went beyond anything Hemingway could have done, even at his best.
One of the few writers, of any era, who truly understood how language works.
She had the ability to be brutally honest about what she liked, and didn't like, and in her time she roasted Reagan and Obama alike.
Her work on California will be iconic, if not already. Her writing on the South was spot on.
She lived a fascinating life, during a chaotic and crazy time in our history.
My favorite quote from her is this, written very early on, just after, I believe, she got out of Berkeley, and headed to NYC.
“Every real American story begins in innocence and never stops mourning the loss of it,” Didion wrote in a 1962 NR piece. “The banishment from Eden is our one great tale, lovingly told and retold, adapted, disguised and told again, passed down from Hester Prynne to Temple Drake, from Natty Bumppo to Holden Caulfield; it is the single stunning fact in our literature, in our folklore, in our history, and in the lyrics of popular songs.”; 12/23/21, 7:09 PM
rcocean said...: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem was a good read. But for all the times California has been going to hell, how come it has never gotten there?"

The California of 1965 or 1985 or even 1995 is long gone. The Mountains and seaside are unchanged, but everything else is. Dummies of couse, don't see the difference. Pigs in slop, don't cha know.

Needless to say, the top 5-10 percent are doing well. They always do well. Maybe Didion was unhappy with the changes. Or maybe she was "insulated". THe decline and fall was avoidable, but could only been avoided if the middle 70% had been active and smart. Which they NEVER are.

THey floated into Calf and took it for granted. And now many of them have run away rather than fight. They'll find out in the next 20 years that "Running away" isn't an option anymore.; 12/23/21, 7:15 PM
William said...: I read some of her books. Iirc, I enjoyed them, but they didn't leave much of a lasting impression. I can't remember much about them except she felt all those portents of doom. So far as I can tell, life hasn't turned out quite as bad as she anticipated. Maybe next year we'll get the apocalypse that our more sensitive souls feel we deserve.; 12/23/21, 11:58 PM
rcommal said...: Cruelly neutral before you were. I hope she was an inspiration. I’m glad to see you noted her passing.

Regards,

Lori; 12/24/21, 2:48 AM
rcommal said...: Cruelly neutral before you were. I hope she was an inspiration. I’m glad to see you noted her passing.

Regards,

Lori; 12/24/21, 3:08 AM
Ozymandias said...: [Out of tremendous admiration for Didion, I want to include among these "Goodbye" comments this abbreviated version of my comment to AA's later post on Didion vs. Woody Allen]

Joan Didion was a floating, piercing consciousness; relentless skepticism reined in short of pessimism because, in her disabused and clear-eyed view, pessimism would suggest something to be pessimistic about; the possibility of an outlook inconsistent with what physicist Sean Carroll calls the “brute facts.”

In Didion one may sense a paradoxical connection with Orwell in their common ability to regard and inspect dismal facts squarely and in direct language, without rationalizing, offering a soothing gloss, or an uplifting coda. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live....We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.” The White Album.; 12/24/21, 10:37 AM