Joan Didion: A unique sculptor of essays
Caitlin Leishman: Interpretation of Juergen Teller’s Joan Didion Portrait for Céline campaign
I borrowed a bundle of books from a former colleague, the kind of sunny person who leaves David Sedaris’ ‘Naked’ on your desk. Her taste in other books was also very much to my liking. Yet, I returned them all…except one—a collection of works by Joan Didion. On the spine are the words ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’
Didion’s subject matter might be mighty but her tone doesn’t get your attention by booming at you. Rather her voice makes her readers aware of things…quietly. Though piercingly. Her words have a habit of lulling me in, gradually creeping up and attaching until they suddenly elicit a visceral reaction, like a snake that seems to appear out of nowhere in one’s path, yet has been there the whole time.
Snakes appeared less metaphorically in her works. In the documentary ‘The center will not hold,’ she says this is because they should be avoided, but that to kill a snake is the same as having a snake. They’re still there. Echoing the snakes she avoided, her writing feels slick, elegant and all seeing, laced with warning.
When I consider the times in which she wrote and the subjects of her essays, think The White Album and Slouching towards Bethlehem, I’m reminded of Cookie Mueller’s ‘Swimming through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black’ which documents quirky, chaotic, heart-wrenching moments of her life during the same era. However, where Mueller wrote from within her events, Didion seems to be writing from above the fray. It’s as though Didion is gazing upon a crystal ball, not wishing to change or predict events, simply waiting for the image to become clear. She waits, pen at the ready, to demystify the everyday disorder that we can’t make sense of ourselves. It might involve interviewing Linda Kasabian of the Manson murders, or unravelling her own personal grief.
Her ‘crystal ball’ is a notebook. Given her first by her mother as a girl, she was told to stop whining, to write it down, she explains in the documentary. The first story she wrote, at around five years-old, was of a woman freezing to death in the artic, who collapses and awakes, only to find herself dying of heat in the desert. And this from her child’s mind. Years continued, notebooks amassed, “see enough and write it down” became a method in itself. Then one day when she would sit down and have to write for work, on a day when the world seemed ‘bankrupt of wonder’, as she put it, she would have a notebook of observations that had ‘accumulated interest’.
At this point I should warn you that continuing on means reading slabs of Didion’s own words, because each of these are pieces of the jigsaw that I take away from her writing. To talk extensively about her writing and not include it seems unjust, though including too much, when you could just go and read her work, seems wasteful — so be it.
In the 1960s Didion ended up working at Vogue. Another writer was meant to submit a piece titled ‘Self Respect: its source, its power’. But the other writer’s words didn’t come, so Didion’s did. She wrote an essay far grittier than Vogue was known for —but they published it anyway.
What could have been a light pump-up piece on self-respect, instead leaves a reader examining the recesses of their mind. She begins,
“…Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
She frames self-respect as something that starts from a loss, then exposes behaviours that most commonly manifest in lieu of self-respect.
“The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one heaps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.”
It’s a passage highlighting the inevitability that that which has, so persistently (if unconsciously), been buried, will be stumbled upon.
Didion then tells us what it feels like, and from where in the void the choice to build it might be plucked.
“To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we post-pone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
Self-respect now becomes not something one must earn, but something we can simply choose to possess, in spite of imperfection. Considering the fallible but fabulous Jordan Baker of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, she points out that,
“…people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from wronged parties…in brief, 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 other, more instantly negotiable virtues.” She clarifies ‘character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life —is the source from which self-respect springs.’
By now, this elusive thing, self-respect, has taken on a kind of shape, and so too does the negative space around it, which makes up a forlorn sort of image that can only be what a lack of self-respect might look like.
“It was once suggested to me that as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag.”
With this inelegant picture in mind, Didion hints that the romance of sadness might be something that some of us find tempting. That during shitty times there’s a certain self-indulgence in imagining a soft flattering light upon tears, that one’s despair might, at least, be graceful.
Didion ends with a warning of sorts…
“It is the phenomenon sometimes called ‘alienation from self’. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one’s sanity becomes an object of speculation among one’s acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”
I interpret this as a far more eloquent approach to articulating that virtue of occasionally being able to say to ourselves, ‘well… fuck it,’ and move on. But this is only my guess. Her article on self-respect does everything but tell you how to get some. This isn’t her business. As in any of her works I’ve read, she observes, questions assumptions, but never preaches.
Didion died of Parkinson’s disease in December 2021. To write as powerfully she did she lived with a certain sternness. In ‘The center will not hold’ she recalled, at the height of the Woodstock era, getting a request to go to an apartment, someone she knew had something she had to see, and to write about. A small toddler sat on the floor of the room. A normal child, except for the white lipstick. It was on acid. Didion described it as ‘gold’, though her eyes upon recalling it, welling up, highlight that shock remains a key ingredient to stories that stick around in the mind. Rationalising the harsher side of journalism. But she did inflict this journalistic scrutiny on herself too.
“You write your material, you used what you had” she says of writing about her contemplations of divorce while on holiday, an article edited in fact by her husband.
Reading Didion’s work is like sitting down and having an honest and disarming conversation with someone about how things really are. Her words, like a renaissance marble sculptor, seem to chip away at the mass of an outer shell, revealing and leaving only what’s left at the core.