Joan Didion on Writing and Revising
This was an interesting one for a few reasons:
- Certainly not a fantastic interview at all.
- The best questions come at the end, oddly, in the perpetually hit-or-miss "let's open it up to the audience for questions" segment.
- There are many moments where Joan Didion seems to be contradictory or aloof for the sake of it.
Ok ok ok. All that said, I'm putting it here because there is something singular about her writing. An incomplete history of the essay (of that annoyingly-labeled genre, "narrative non-fiction") -- and of America in the late 60s -- would exclude Joan Didion. She has a vivid knack for detail, is a master of the last paragraph, makes cigarettes and tuna sandwiches gorgeous elements of difficult scenes, and can plunge you into Haight-Ashbury in 1969 or the necessity of keeping a notebook or the contours of self-respect with equally distinct rhythm and melody. She dealt with immense tragedy as well (losing her husband and daughter in such a short span), and her writing has always had a palpable sense of darkness that she's happy to present raw and un-shined.
The other night -- my apartment holding that perfectly warm/cool natural balance that only happens a few weeks a year -- I pulled all the books of hers that I own (both read and unread) from my shelves, made myself a hot cup of some sort of berry tea, and settled into a new documentary about her. It's good and troubling: a woman whose words and mind I admire immensely, for whom I'd love to stir the right sort of martini and ask 98234750 questions, but who would also (I get the sense) leave me quite sad.
Watching it and pausing it to spend some time re-exploring the marked-up margins of her books (Remember what it was to be me, I had underlined) brought me back to Russian Hill in San Francisco, where I first bought her and read her. I stopped once to listen to Half Moon, one of those rambly raspy Janis Joplin songs that sings the difficulty that Didion writes, a difficulty that made me fall in love with both. I looked up first sentences (It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends) and favorite sentences (We miss each other's points, have another drink and regard the fire). And by the time it was all done -- hours later -- I had so many many MANY things to say that I think I just fell asleep.
Listen to this podcast if you like. Or better, pick up Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Start there, and when you read its final essay and make your way to New York, tell me you can't walk around Manhattan -- avenues and shop-fronts and skyline -- without thinking things like ahhhh yes yesyesss ok I see I see.
