Why do i write joan didion

Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you.

Like many writers I have only this one "subject," this one "area": the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front.

I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word "intellectual" I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. 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. Access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.

If this warning seemed eccentric on the eve of electing an institutional Vice-President and, four years later, the Man from Hope, it does not seem so today. The problem Didion first identified in has been treated as a revelation in recent years. Her position as a disaffected insider—hanging out with the Doors but crying foul on the Summer of Love, writing for the newsstand but declaiming its idiocy—made her an aggressive contrarian. In fact, her recent canonization notwithstanding, Didion spent most of her career as a magnet for daggers in the letters columns.

That was in response to a searing broadside against the films of Woody Allen which Didion published in She was needling her readers, naturally, but the objection also shows a lot about her narrative intelligence and about the way she should be read. That kind of storytelling was everywhere in America, she thought. And it was insidious, because it allowed destructive ideas to sneak in underneath the petticoats of right-thinking endeavors.

One of the columns in the new collection picks apart a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. What irked Didion was that although the meeting seemed to be about taking responsibility, it actually refracted blame. Didion did it well and, as with the hippies , traced how a moment of supposed healing spun toward delusion and drove people farther apart. Atomization and sentimentality exacerbate each other, after all: you break the bridges of connection across society, and then give each island a fairy tale about its uniqueness.

Didion was interested in how that happens. And so she moved to Los Angeles, where the grownups live. This claim for California as a stronghold of urbanity and groundedness was contrary, even petulant.

Didion had grown up in Sacramento and began her reporting from California at a moment when the national narrative of the West Coast—what went on there, what it meant—was shaped by editors and emissaries from New York. But, where the Eastern press had decided that California stood for futurism, beaches, lush life, and togetherness, Didion insisted on a California of dusty houses, dry inland landscapes, fires and snakes, and social alienation.

And so they pinned their ideas to details of landscape: this realization fixed to this tree, or the sight of the Bevatron at night, that one to a jasmine-covered porch—the Northern California style of intellection. Didion left the city in , but this remained her perception when she returned twenty-four years later:. The insistent sentimentalization of experience. Didion saw something else: a city victimized by decades of fatuous thinking and poor planning.

In crisis, New Yorkers simply doubled down, appointing heroes or villains in the jogger case, trying to keep the fairy tale aloft. Even more important, it insisted on a link between the fate of a society and the way that its stories were told. What it meant to be a writer—imaginatively and morally—had interested Didion since she spent her teen-age years retyping Hemingway sentences, trying to understand the way they worked. But it was precisely not working in this consensus realm that made great artists great.

For whatever reason, these complaints usually come from men. How does Joan Didion write? How did Dominique die? How old is Dominique Dunne? Where did Dominique Dunne die?

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