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Joan Didion Has Died At 87

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things,” Joan Didion once wrote, “and harder to see the ends.” That author, journalist, style icon, and north star for a certain type of literary young person died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old.

Didion may have been famous since the late 1960s, but hers was the rare sort of celebrity that never dampened her respectability. Not even modelling in fashion advertisements (for Gap, in 1989, and for Celine, in 2015) could shake her status within the literary world, nor affect the particular influence she held for the millions of readers who attempted to ape her style over the years. That meant everything from adopting a working wardrobe of leotards, suede wrap skirts, and long, unassuming silhouettes, to shaping their own habits after what they could glean of hers – whether via her bourbon-filled packing lists, her journal entries, or her surgically precise journalism. And why wouldn’t they? It was Didion, after all, who once wrote of Georgia O’Keeffe: “Style is character.”

Didion was born in Sacramento, California, in 1934, a fifth-generation Californian and the descendant of a pioneer family – her ancestors travelled West at least part of the way with the Donner Party – and she was herself frequently depicted as a kind of pioneer, cutting new paths through the American landscape with her writing and illuminating Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1960s with a rare incision. “It’s hard to have an idea about California in general that is free from her influence,” Dana Goodyear wrote of Didion in Vogue in 2005. But it’s also hard to think about New York, where Didion moved in 1956, without falling under her sway. “New York was no mere city,” Didion wrote in “Goodbye to All That,” her seminal 1967 essay about leaving the city: “It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”

Didion studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley and worked at Vogue from 1956 to 1964, where she was an assistant features editor and wrote such seminal essays as “On Self Respect” (1961) in order to fill some unexpectedly empty pages. “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” she wrote. “Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” 

She came to Vogue “in lieu of going to graduate school,” she wrote in the magazine in 1992, having received the Prix de Paris, an essay contest for college seniors for which first prize was a position at the magazine. This career shift was considered unusual at the time, Didion wrote in 2000, and was “a move treated by most of the faculty members to whom I mentioned it as a temporary aberration, since the appropriate move from the English Department at Berkeley was to graduate school at Berkeley.”

“ Vogue was an eccentric and in some ways an exotic education, but there was about it an invigorating strictness,” Didion wrote in 1992. “We did not miss deadlines, we did not make mistakes, we learned fast, or we did not stay, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence of precisely thirty-nine characters. I did stay... I counted characters during the day and wrote a novel at night, and until I got married and moved to California, it never seriously occurred to me to work anywhere else.” The novel was 1963’s Run River , and the husband was her fellow magazine writer John Gregory Dunne. The marriage, she would later write, was “a very good thing to do but badly timed.” She was afflicted by migraines and was frequently depressed, even wearing dark glasses through the wedding ceremony. The couple adopted a daughter in 1966 and named her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state on the Yucatán peninsula.

Family life brought its own complications. The first sentence of her first column for Life magazine, in 1969, sent from the Royal Hawaiian in Honolulu, was: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” This was a period of larger self-doubt, heavily influenced by the chaotic events of 1968 – both in the broader and more personal sense. “Everything I was taught seems beside the point,” she wrote in Life . “The point itself seems increasingly obscure.” Dunne, suffering from a protracted case of writer’s block, decamped alone during the summer of 1968 and lived for 18 months off the Strip in Las Vegas among prostitutes, card sharks, and comedians; he published a novel called Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season in 1974. “Didion,” the New York Times later reported , “bought him three sets of clean sheets and a wastepaper basket; she did not see the apartment until the day he headed home.” It did not seem to be a major point of contention in the marriage. “They were, in the best sense of the word, enmeshed in each other’s lives,” a friend of the couple, told the Los Angeles Times in 2005: “As writers and people, they were one of those rare couples in which both people really appreciated in the other the things they appreciated in themselves.”

In California, “on my own, turned loose in the world,” Didion published Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), a collection of her magazine pieces that The New York Times called “a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.” Time magazine sent the photographer Julian Wasser to capture her that year, perched on her “Daytona yellow” Corvette, dangling a cigarette. (She told Vogue in 2014 that the now-iconic pose – hair limp, eyes bright, cooly impassive, and that car – must have been a whim of Wasser’s; the photographer told Vogue that it wasn’t, and moreover, that “you don’t tell a woman like that what to do.”) She wrote her second novel, Play It As It Lays , in 1970, and the screenplay for it in 1971. She and Dunne then became in demand as script doctors, and wrote screenplays together, including The Panic in Needle Park , in 1971, and the Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson version of A Star Is Born , in 1976.

In 1972, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, after experiencing periods of blindness in alternate eyes that lasted for up to six weeks at a time. “I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife,” she would write of the diagnosis. “In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me.” She lived with the disease in remission for most of her life, and told the Los Angeles Times that she never went to get further testing to prove or disprove the diagnosis when such technology became widely available, because “I hadn’t had a symptom since the early ’70s and it didn’t seem worth it to have an MRI to prove something I didn’t want to prove.” (“Mortality seems to be one of those things you confront over and over again without quite getting it,” she added.) In 1979, she published The White Album , another collection of her journalism from Life , Esquire , The New York Times, and the New York Review of Books; Martin Amis called her “the poet of the Great Californian Emptiness” in his (not altogether glowing) review of it for the London Review of Books.

Didion and Dunne revelled in a kind of starry Hollywood domesticity. They threw regular parties, and were admirably modern in the raising of their daughter: Dunne would make breakfast for Quintana and take her to school in the mornings, while Didion would “get up, have a Coca-Cola, and start work.” They appeared in gossip columns along with the likes of Bianca Jagger, Paul Morrissey, and Linda Ronstadt. Throughout it all, Didion became the foremost prose stylist of her day. “She has created, in her books, one of the most devastating and distinctive portraits of modern America to be found in fiction or nonfiction – a portrait of America where ‘disorder was its own point,’” Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times in 1979 . “A gifted reporter with an eye for the telling detail – the frayed hem, the shaking hand – she is also a prescient witness, finding in her own experiences parallels of the times. The voice is always precise, the tone unsentimental, the view unabashedly subjective. She takes things personally.” Later in the same article, the Times noted that “Didion's friends jokingly refer to her as the ‘Kafka of Brentwood Park,’ which amuses her husband no end.” Added Dunne: “Joan’s really a rather cheerful person who drives a bright yellow Corvette. In person, she doesn’t have a dark view of life. She just doesn’t expect a lot from it or from people.” 

Eventually, Didion turned her nonfiction away from observational reporting and introspection (the response she’d had from readers was emotionally overwhelming, and “there was no way for me to reach out and help them back,” The New Republic says she once told an interviewer) and toward the expertly-argued analytical essay. She published the critically lauded Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), and Where I Was From , in 2003.

In 1988, she and Dunne moved back to New York, where they remained until Dunne died suddenly of a heart attack in December 2003, right before their 40th anniversary. At the time, their daughter, Quintana, was unconscious in the intensive-care unit at Beth Israel hospital, suffering from pneumonia that had turned into septic shock. Didion delayed Dunne’s funeral for three months until Quintana was well enough to attend. Quintana died a year and a half later, in August 2005, a few months after Didion was awarded a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking about her grief, and won the National Book Award for it. “I wanted to capture the obsessiveness of going over the scene again and again, hoping to somehow change the ending,” she told Vogue , “It was like a fever breaking.” 

In 2007, she and Scott Rudin adapted the book for the stage as a one-woman show starring Vanessa Redgrave. Grief became one of the defining aspects of Didion’s public profile, as much a part of her character as that enviable sentence structure, those dark sunglasses, that Corvette. In 2011, Didion published Blue Nights , about ageing and the loss of her daughter – a tome that the New York Times described as a work in which she comes to grips with “the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.” In 2012, Didion received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. “I’m surprised she hasn’t already gotten this award,” Obama told reporters on the day.

For many, through her writing about love and loss, innocence and deception, nostalgia and memory, Didion invented a way of being in the world: an observer, judiciously above the fray, holding it all at an elegant remove. “There is something tomboyishly beautiful about her, but also flinty and remote, and somewhat unnerving, the way someone who is both detached and wise can be,” Susan Orlean wrote of Didion in a profile for Vogue in 2002, in which Nora Ephron praised her cooking and her sense of humour, and Calvin Trillin her familial, personable warmth. She was both brilliant and driven, and continued to produce incomparable work in spite of her well-cataloged dread, her paralysis, her irritability, and her “neurotic inarticulateness.”

Perhaps her most famous line is: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And what stories! “Many writers write vexed introspection, or detail-oriented reporting, or counterintuitive cultural commentary, or lifestyle journalism. But so far only Didion has done all four in perfect synthesis, a prose that, at its best, can fire on every cylinder and work on multiple fields of the imagination at once,” Nathan Heller wrote for Vogue in 2014 in an essay that praised her talent for composition as “Mozartian.” She seemed, in other words, to be entirely in control of herself, all of the time, even when elegantly explaining every single way that she was utterly beyond reach. (Not everyone was impressed: the film critic Pauline Kael famously seethed in a New Yorker review of one of Didion’s novels that “the ultimate princess fantasy is to be so glamorously sensitive and beautiful that you have to be taken care of…you see the truth, and so you suffer more than ordinary people and can’t function.” But even Kael concedes a few lines later, “Certainly, I admit that Miss Didion can write.”)

Didion kept to herself for the later years of her life, writing rarely and turning down requests for biography projects and documentary films – until her nephew, the actor and director Griffin Dunne, proposed one. He crowd-raised the required funding to shoot it in a matter of weeks. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold was released in October 2017; in it, Didion retained what the New Yorker dubbed the reporter’s “perpetual straddle between empathy and detachment.” Reviews of the project tended to focus on the documentary's enviable intimacy and its ultimate lack of killer instinct – as a film, it was never as unflinching as its subject. To watch the documentary was to feel that Didion may have been under the lens, but continued to pull the strings behind it, well aware of the power she'd so often held: the person who seems to tell everything and give absolutely nothing away. When Dana Spiotta asked Didion for Vogue what people tend to get wrong about her, she replied: “I am not as fragile as people imagine me to be.” She never was.

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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her read­er. She rhetor­i­cal­ly asks and answers: “…was any­one ever so young? I am here to tell you that some­one was.” The wry lit­tle moment is per­fect­ly indica­tive of Didion’s unspar­ing­ly iron­ic crit­i­cal voice. Did­ion is a con­sum­mate crit­ic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always fore­most a judge of her­self. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first nov­el while work­ing for Vogue , “Good­bye to All That” fre­quent­ly shifts point of view as Did­ion exam­ines the truth of each state­ment, her prose mov­ing seam­less­ly from delib­er­a­tion to com­men­tary, anno­ta­tion, aside, and apho­rism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process per­haps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from some­where else, a city only for the very young.

Any­one who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-alter­ing city—will know the pangs of res­ig­na­tion Did­ion cap­tures. These eco­nom­ic times and every oth­er pro­duce many such sto­ries. But Did­ion made some­thing entire­ly new of famil­iar sen­ti­ments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a col­lec­tion of breakup let­ters to New York with the same title, the unsen­ti­men­tal pre­ci­sion and com­pact­ness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , a rep­re­sen­ta­tive text of the lit­er­ary non­fic­tion of the six­ties along­side the work of John McPhee, Ter­ry South­ern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thomp­son. In Didion’s case, the empha­sis must be decid­ed­ly on the lit­er­ary —her essays are as skill­ful­ly and imag­i­na­tive­ly writ­ten as her fic­tion and in close con­ver­sa­tion with their autho­r­i­al fore­bears. “Good­bye to All That” takes its title from an ear­li­er mem­oir, poet and crit­ic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leav­ing his home­town in Eng­land to fight in World War I. Didion’s appro­pri­a­tion of the title shows in part an iron­ic under­cut­ting of the mem­oir as a seri­ous piece of writ­ing.

And yet she is per­haps best known for her work in the genre. Pub­lished almost fifty years after Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , her 2005 mem­oir The Year of Mag­i­cal Think­ing is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faith­ful account” of the stun­ning­ly sud­den and crush­ing per­son­al calami­ties that claimed the lives of her hus­band and daugh­ter sep­a­rate­ly. “Though the mate­r­i­al is lit­er­al­ly ter­ri­ble,” Pin­sky writes, “the writ­ing is exhil­a­rat­ing and what unfolds resem­bles an adven­ture nar­ra­tive: a forced expe­di­tion into those ‘cliffs of fall’ iden­ti­fied by Hop­kins.” He refers to lines by the gift­ed Jesuit poet Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins that Did­ion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has moun­tains; cliffs of fall / Fright­ful, sheer, no-man-fath­omed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The near­ly unim­peach­ably author­i­ta­tive ethos of Didion’s voice con­vinces us that she can fear­less­ly tra­verse a wild inner land­scape most of us triv­i­al­ize, “hold cheap,” or can­not fath­om. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review inter­view , Didion—with that tech­ni­cal sleight of hand that is her casu­al mastery—called her­self “a kind of appren­tice plumber of fic­tion, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of arche­type of lit­er­ary mod­esty (John Locke, for exam­ple, called him­self an “under­labour­er” of knowl­edge) while also fig­ur­ing her­self as the win­some hero­ine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch com­e­dy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jen­nifer Jones, a char­ac­ter who learns to thumb her nose at pow­er and priv­i­lege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Lin­da Kuehl’s death—meant that Did­ion wrote her own intro­duc­tion to the Paris Review inter­view, a very unusu­al occur­rence that allows her to assume the role of her own inter­preter, offer­ing iron­ic prefa­to­ry remarks on her self-under­stand­ing. After the intro­duc­tion, it’s dif­fi­cult not to read the inter­view as a self-inter­ro­ga­tion. Asked about her char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of writ­ing as a “hos­tile act” against read­ers, Did­ion says, “Obvi­ous­ly I lis­ten to a read­er, but the only read­er I hear is me. I am always writ­ing to myself. So very pos­si­bly I’m com­mit­ting an aggres­sive and hos­tile act toward myself.”

It’s a curi­ous state­ment. Didion’s cut­ting wit and fear­less vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty take in seem­ing­ly all—the expans­es of her inner world and polit­i­cal scan­dals and geopo­lit­i­cal intrigues of the out­er, which she has dis­sect­ed for the bet­ter part of half a cen­tu­ry. Below, we have assem­bled a selec­tion of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay col­lec­tion The White Album brought togeth­er some of her most tren­chant and search­ing essays about her immer­sion in the coun­ter­cul­ture, and the ide­o­log­i­cal fault lines of the late six­ties and sev­en­ties. The title essay begins with a gem­like sen­tence that became the title of a col­lec­tion of her first sev­en vol­umes of non­fic­tion : “We tell our­selves sto­ries in order to live.” Read two essays from that col­lec­tion below:

“ The Women’s Move­ment ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Did­ion has main­tained a vig­or­ous pres­ence at the New York Review of Books since the late sev­en­ties, writ­ing pri­mar­i­ly on pol­i­tics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insid­er Base­ball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teach­ings of Speak­er Gin­grich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opin­ions, or the Hinge of His­to­ry ” (2003)

“ Pol­i­tics in the New Nor­mal Amer­i­ca ” (2004)

“ The Case of There­sa Schi­a­vo ” (2005)

“ The Def­er­en­tial Spir­it ” (2013)

“ Cal­i­for­nia Notes ” (2016)

Did­ion con­tin­ues to write with as much style and sen­si­tiv­i­ty as she did in her first col­lec­tion, her voice refined by a life­time of expe­ri­ence in self-exam­i­na­tion and pierc­ing crit­i­cal appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she pub­lished an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay there that returns to the theme of “yearn­ing for a glam­orous, grown up life” that she explored in “Good­bye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glass­es ,” Didion’s gaze is stead­ier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tem­pered and hard­ened by New York, but on her­self as a child “deter­mined to bypass child­hood” and emerge as a poised, self-con­fi­dent 24-year old sophisticate—the per­fect New York­er she nev­er became.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joan Did­ion Reads From New Mem­oir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Direct­ed by Grif­fin Dunne

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

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Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

“In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time,..”

Dead link to the essay

It should be “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem,” with the “s” on Towards.

Most of the Joan Did­ion Essay links have pay­walls.

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The Perfect Prose of a Joan Didion Photo Caption

“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” —Joan Didion

In the early nineteen-sixties, while on the staff of Vogue , Joan Didion was only half known to the magazine’s readers. Her name appeared intermittently. Her first signed piece, in June 1961, was a short essay on jealousy, which already showed certain features of her mature writing: an earnest consideration of the brittle contours of her own character, and a fine attention to language, including her own. She also wrote short, unattributed paragraphs—they cannot be called essays, articles, or pieces—for Vogue ’s regular “People Are Talking About” column. She wrote about “Dr. No” and “The Manchurian Candidate”; about the atom bomb, Telstar, and the construction of the Guggenheim; about the budding careers of Willem de Kooning, Woody Allen, and Barbra Streisand; and about the death of Marilyn Monroe, whom she called “a profoundly moving young woman.” And she composed photo captions: those “signposts,” as Walter Benjamin put it, that had become essential to the printed magazine page in the twentieth century.

In Vogue , by the sixties, captions were surprisingly substantial pieces of writing, accorded what might seem a remarkable amount of editorial care. The captions Didion wrote make up a minor, telling aspect of the mythology around her work, though perhaps “mythology” is the wrong word. It is a matter of style, where style is verifiable presence on the page. Didion is frequently described as an exact and exacting writer, her prose like a shiny carapace. At the same time, she has a reputation for being brittle and spectral, barely there. None of this adequately describes her prose. It is usually direct and declarative; it is filled with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions; there is a wealth of concrete detail. Irony in her work consists largely of the plain statement of such detail, inflected by the innocent, mad, or bad-faith language of the people or institutions she is writing about. In a lecture at U.C.L.A., Didion said, “I’m not much interested in spontaneity. I’m not an inspirational writer. What concerns me is total control.”

Producing captions, Didion has said, was part of mounting “the monthly grand illusion” of a glossy magazine. The editor-in-chief then was Diana Vreeland, but the more detailed work was done by Allene Talmey, who had been with Vogue since the mid-nineteen-thirties and became an associate editor in 1963. By the accounts of Didion and her contemporaries, Talmey was an unsparing editor and boss. After she had wielded her pencil on another writer’s copy—flashing, all the while, a large aquamarine and silver ring—the writer was wrung out. (“Well, my dear, I used to go home, sit in the tub, and weep ,” one young woman said.) In an interview with The Paris Review , in 1978, Didion said , “Every day I would go into [Talmey’s] office with eight lines of copy or a caption or something. She would sit there and mark it up with a pencil and get very angry about extra words, about verbs not working.” In a profile of Didion in the New York Times, in 1979, Talmey herself recounted how she would ask Didion to write a caption of three or four hundred words, and then together they would cut it down to fifty. “We wrote long and published short and by doing that Joan learned to write.”

The Times article coincided with the publication of “ Telling Stories ,” Didion’s only collection of short fiction—if you can call three stories a collection. In the book’s preface, she elaborates on her time at Vogue and the rigors of working under Talmey. “We were connoisseurs of synonyms,” she writes. “We were collectors of verbs.” Certain words went in and out of fashion—“to ravish” was for some months an editorially approved verb. “I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favoured noun: ‘ravishments’, as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Fabergé eggs, other ravishments .” Didion and her young colleagues learned—or else “did not stay”—to use active verbs instead of passive, to make sure “it” always had a nearby reference, to reach for the O.E.D. to insure surprise as much as precision. And, most of all, they learned to rewrite, time and again, in search of the correct balance of elegance and excitement. “Run it through again, sweetie,” Talmey would say. “It’s not quite there.”

“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” I came across the sentence first online, in the 1979 profile, where it is offered as an example of Didion’s caption-writing for Vogue at the start of her career. So much to admire, not least the verbless economy of the sentence, as if the caption’s function—its act of pointing, or its open-handed gesture—does away with the need for verbs. (What would the verbed alternatives be? “All through the house are colour, verve . . .” Or “one finds.” The additions all seem to weaken the sentence.) The caption directs us to a single picture, but it also stands for a whole; “all through the house,” with its slumberous familiarity—“It was the night before Christmas . . .”—conjures time as well as space. In her preface to “Telling Stories,” Didion recalls that Talmey liked things, especially qualifiers, to come in threes. And so it is here, with the somewhat abstracted features: “colour, verve, improvised treasures.” What is an improvised treasure? A found object, or Duchampian readymade, the value of which derives from the artist-collector’s choosing and acquiring it? Or maybe “improvised” refers to a casual mode of display, to a style of living with things rather than to the things themselves?

Then we have “happy but anomalous coexistence”—“happy” here meaning apt, fortunate, and pleasing, rather than pleased or (in the nearly vanished sense) happenstance. I like the way this term has been elongated, allowed to spread itself around. The absence of stricturing commas around “but anomalous” is in line with Didion’s later style: she knows better than most when to leave out the commas for which other writers (or their editors) instinctively reach, to let grammar and a certain sonic ease do their work. The sentence sounds like Didion in its rhythm, care, and thrift, and also in its swerve toward something more troubling or mysterious, the suggestion in the final phrase of an impish curating personality at work.

Was I right to think about the sentence in this way? Here is what I found when I turned from the Times to Didion’s more detailed account, in the preface to “Telling Stories,” of her time at Vogue —an apprenticeship, she says, that is too easy to mock. At first, she composed merchandising copy, and then promotional copy (“the distinction between the two was definite but recondite”), and eventually editorial copy. As “a sample of the latter,” Didion includes our caption, or an extended version of it:

Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence. Here, a Frank Stella, an art nouveau stained-glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein. Not shown: a table covered with frankly brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard .

The sentence, at least in this telling, is followed by two more that open out, show us the treasures, and include both some nice economies (“a Mexican find,” not “a find in Mexico”) and bright phrasing: the “frankly brilliant oilcloth.”

But run it through again, because we’re not quite there. On the desk in front of me—an eBay find, at fifty dollars—I have the August 1, 1965, issue of American Vogue . In the way of popular magazines of that period, it reads now as a surprisingly highbrow artifact. There is a substantial feature on Giacometti, a movie review by Elizabeth Hardwick, and a report by Didion on the new National Museum of Anthropology, in Mexico City: “One comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities.” A few pages after Didion and Hardwick, the magazine announces its twenty-fifth Prix de Paris, “a career competition for college seniors,” the first prize a year on the magazine as a junior editor and a trip to Paris, to see the shows. Didion herself had won the prize, in 1956, with an essay on the California architect William Wilson Wurster. It was what brought her to New York; she turned down the Paris trip in favor of real work at the magazine.

Didion’s caption appears in the “Fashions in Living” department, alongside a culinary conversation with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and a short drinks feature titled “Through Deepest Summer with Zest and Cube.” The piece to which Didion contributed is called “The Loved House of the Dennis Hoppers”—the plural denoting both Hopper and his wife, the actor Brooke Hayward—and was written by the novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, with photographs of house and family by Hopper himself. Southern’s tone is hipster New Journalist, a touch embarrassing even for its time. His opening paragraph: “The Den Hoppers are tops in their field. Precisely what their field is, is by no means certain—except that she is a Great Beauty, and he a kind of Mad Person.” Southern leads us on a zany tour of Hopper’s acting career, his politics (a “jaunt” to photograph the Selma marches earlier that year), counter-cultural affiliations (Ginsberg, et al.), and his art collection, a subject on which Southern solicits an approving comment from Frank O’Hara. It’s an entertaining, imprecise, and exhausting sort of writing, rather like its author’s description of his subject: “To walk down a city street with him is like being attached to a moving adrenaline pump.”

There is energy of a kind in the captions, too, but it is coolly and rigorously contained. “ Left , Mrs. Hopper, who is the actress Brooke Hayward, poses in a red leather chair for Robert Walker, junior. The pillow reads ‘Long May It Wave.’ ” Or this: “To visit the Hopper house is to be, at every turn, surprised, freshly beguiled by a kaleidoscopically shifting assemblage of found objects, loved objects, objets d’art .” At the bottom of the first page of the piece, one finds the passage that Didion quotes in “Telling Stories”—the passage later cited by the Times and, as “an early example” of her Vogue editorial copy, by Didion’s biographer, Tracy Daugherty. Or, rather, you find this: “ Opposite, above , through the house, colour, verve, things in happy, anomalous coexistence. Here, a Frank Stella painting, an art nouveau stained glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein painting.”

What has happened, exactly? Let us stick with the first sentence for now. Never mind the italics, or the comma instead of a colon. Onward, to the most obvious difference, which is of course this: “things in happy, anomalous coexistence.” Things . In the caption as printed on page 138 of Vogue , the word comes three lines from the bottom, at the right-hand limit of a run of short nouns: “house, colour, verve, things.” (I feel justified in treating the sentence in this line-by-line fashion, because Didion tells us that she was working within not only strict word limits but character counts too: the shape of available space on the page mattered.) Things —it subtracts from the rhythm of the sentence heard aloud, and seems in all respects a feeble word choice, inexact and thin.

Except, except: recall that line of Didion’s in her piece about the Mexican museum. Here is the whole sentence: “Inside, the collection is too overwhelming to see all at once; one comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities.” Sometimes, in the face of profusion, when tempted by treasures, you need instead a word as unshowy as “things.” The caption is seventeen lines long, printed in small sans-serif type. And it starts like this: “Up in the Hollywood Hills, above the Sunset Strip, Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Hopper (portraits, above left ) have a house of such gaiety and wit that it seems the result of some marvellous scavenger hunt, full of improvised treasures, the bizarre and the beautiful and the banal in wild juxtaposition, everything the most of its kind.”

There they are, the “improvised treasures,” as if some careless admiring guest has picked them up and put them down in the wrong place. It’s not the only phrase in Didion’s remembered version of her caption that looks like it’s been moved from where we first found it. Here, again, is the second sentence, from 1965: “Here, a Frank Stella painting, an art nouveau stained glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein painting.” And the version she gives us in 1978: “Here, a Frank Stella, an art-nouveau stained-glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein.” So much better without the repeated “painting.” And what about the thing not shown: “a table covered with frankly brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard”? Actually, that is shown, but four pages further on, with the caption “Everywhere in the Hopper house the point is to amuse, to delight. Near right, above , in the breakfast room, the table covered with brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard.”

Enough detail, enough quotation. Between 1965 and 1978, what is Didion doing and why should I, let alone you, care? When I first found these disparities, I was seized with the sort of excitement that must overtake real scholars when they discover, for example, telling variations among printed or manuscript copies of the same great poem. But a photo caption from a fashion magazine, a scrap of anonymous juvenilia—how could such a small detail matter? Except it did, or does, to Joan Didion. Perhaps the printed version is evidence of Talmey’s editing and Didion’s rewriting, with fragments of the first effort—“run it through again, sweetie”—dispersed about the magazine’s pages. Or (and I vastly prefer this possibility) Didion has gone to the magazine—it would not be unusual to keep your early periodical appearances around for thirteen years, or longer—and improved upon the version she wrote in 1965.

An attention to sound—to getting the right sound—in writing has been for Didion a lifelong occupation. In “ The Year of Magical Thinking ,” she tells us, “As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.” But she doesn’t just hear things. She sees them, too:

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.

This is from “ Why I Write ,” a piece that Didion wrote for the Times , in 1976. “The picture dictates the arrangement.” You have to wonder where a writer would learn such a lesson, or learn to express it in such terms, if not from writing about actual pictures. When I was the age Didion was when she composed these captions for Vogue , I was used to writing only about books, writing about words, writing about writing. I learned to write about everything else—what we might call life— by training myself to write about photographs. That practice was an excellent education in hearing the affinities between words and things, between the structure of a scene and the shape of a sentence. The picture dictates the arrangement: this is what I hear Joan Didion discovering, then reminding herself of thirteen years later. She was getting used to writing, she said, about the kind of people who had Stellas and Lichtensteins and bargains from Mexico. But she was also just getting used to putting one thing beside another.

This essay was drawn from “ Suppose a Sentence ,” which is out in September from New York Review Books.

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What Joan Didion means to us

Her last book, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, tapped into what made the late writer an icon.

by Alissa Wilkinson

Editor’s note : The writer Joan Didion died on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87. Her final book, the essay collection Let Me Tell You What I Mean , was released in January 2021; the following essay was first published that month.

In the spring of 1975, 40-year-old Joan Didion was both the “Regents’ Lecturer” at UC Berkeley, her alma mater, and kind of a nervous wreck. By then, she was successful, having published two novels ( Run River and Play It as It Lays ) and a very highly regarded book of essays ( Slouching Towards Bethlehem ), along with scores of articles, reviews, and columns. In 1973, Tom Wolfe included Didion in his anthology The New Journalism , which solidified her place alongside Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, George Plimpton, and other practitioners of an experience-driven, subjective brand of reporting (even if she always insisted the best journalists knew to stand outside the story). She had also been a guest lecturer before, most notably at Yale a year prior.

She was not yet recognizable as Joan Didion, icon. But everything was about to change.

At Berkeley, she was set to spend a month on campus as a visiting teacher, then conclude her stint with a public lecture. The classroom reviews were not stellar. Didion’s biographer Tracy Daugherty writes that “one student said the class was terribly awkward and tense. Didion would read to them in a barely audible voice or stare at them in silence, drumming her fingers on the desk.”

That version of Didion — quiet, ill at ease, seemingly wanting to be anywhere but where she was — is not a wholly unfamiliar figure to today’s reader. In interviews, especially very recent ones , she often comes across as terse and evasive, like she’d rather be doing literally anything else. But if you’ve read her essays from that era, it’s still a little startling. How could this timid, perplexing lecturer be the source of the wry, detailed, sometimes even chatty voice that pops up in much of her writing?

During her time at Berkeley, Didion was simply buried in writing a new book, and her natural shyness, coupled with a kind of anxiety, likely contributed to her in-class manner. In an autobiographical passage in her 1984 novel Democracy , Didion writes of that period, “In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole,” noting that “I seemed able to concentrate only on reading newspapers.”

Whatever the reason, the English faculty at Berkeley had more or less stopped taking her seriously by the time her brief tenure was over, and booked only a small room for her culminating public lecture. Didion, apprehensive and on edge, later told a friend that she had to work up the nerve to ask for a larger room, and so the departmental secretary switched the event to a lecture hall.

She was terrified. What if it didn’t fill? What if it did ? Before the lecture, Didion hid in the ladies’ room, certain she was about to throw up.

She shouldn’t have been worried. Caitlin Flanagan, then a teenager and the daughter of a Berkeley professor, recounted years later the “Didion-mania” that broke out, startling the university’s faculty. The youthful Flanagan wasn’t at the lecture, but she heard about it. “It was a madhouse,” Flanagan wrote. Whatever resistance Didion experienced at Berkeley stood in marked contrast to the passionate horde of fans who appeared to hear her speak. “There were tearful women who were turned away at the door, others grateful to stand in the back or to sit on the floor, a huge, rapt crowd of the type that doesn’t feature in even the wildest dreams of most writers.”

For women who had read her essays and novels, Didion’s Everywoman persona — a measured voice that processed a world as it fell to pieces — was a conduit for their own emotions. She was their Superwoman.

Joan Didion, the writer, already had her fans, but Daugherty points to the Berkeley lecture as the moment that Joan Didion, the icon, was born. For the next several decades, Didion would be viewed through not just a literary lens but an aesthetic one. She would come to symbolize cool. In 2015, at 80 years old, she would model for the French luxury brand Celine . A famous photograph with a cigarette and a Corvette Stingray would be taped up above the desks of aspiring young women writers for decades to come. Her 1968 essay “Goodbye to All That,” in which she recounts going to pieces and moving away from New York City, would practically generate its own subgenre of imitation. She meant something to people. She means something to people.

That night at Berkeley in 1975, Didion gave a lecture titled “Why I Write.” It became one of her most well-known works. “Why I Write” was published in the New York Times in 1976 and makes frequent use of one of Didion’s signature rhetorical devices: She makes a statement, then tells the audience what she means by what she just said.

“It took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer,” she explains. Then she quickly clarifies: “By which I mean not a ‘good’ writer or a ‘bad’ writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.”

“Why I Write” is really an explanation for how Didion views meaning as inextricable from syntax itself: “To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed,” she writes. To her, a writer is not primarily a prophet or a polemicist; a writer is someone who uses hammers and saws to shape the raw building blocks of words. Writers coax meaning from the words themselves, from turns of phrase, from the construction of sentences. A writer knows how to conceal and reveal significance by placing the building blocks well.

And, most importantly, a writer looks past the obvious, past surface-level appearances, past the fictions people construct to turn the disorder of the world into order, starting with their own inner life. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” reads one of the most famous lines in “Why I Write.” Writing brings order from chaotic thought, even if the world itself is chaos.

• Joan Didion is more interesting than the new Netflix documentary about her

Until now, despite its vaunted status, “Why I Write” has never appeared in one of Didion’s essay collections. But it’s in her newest book, Let Me Tell You What I Mean . For an author as obsessed with meaning as Didion, that title is a revealing double entendre, and one that seems to hang on that moment at Berkeley in 1975. She is telling us what she means, as she told that standing-room-only audience. And she is also telling us what she means, here in 2021, after decades of being one of America’s most admired, most argued-over writers.

Twelve previously uncollected essays, spanning 1968 to 2000, cover all kinds of different subjects: alt-weeklies, failing to get into Stanford, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographic subjects, the pitch-perfect personal branding of Martha Stewart. She writes on Ernest Hemingway and on William Randolph Hearst’s palatial Xanadu estate. Her infamously surgical evisceration of Nancy Reagan is also included here, in the form of a 1968 magazine profile entitled “Pretty Nancy,” which was found so objectionable by its subject that she wrote of Didion in her memoirs, “She had obviously written the story in her mind before she ever met me.”

Some essays in the collection feel very personal, like Didion’s remembrance of friend, director, and producer Tony Richardson. (Richardson’s daughter, with Vanessa Redgrave, was the late actress Natasha Richardson, who died in a skiing accident in 2009; Redgrave in turn played Didion in the Broadway production of Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking , about grief.)

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a small book — literally, you can practically slip it into your back pocket — and it feels more like an appendix or an album of B-sides to Didion’s oeuvre than a fully fleshed-out new entry. Scholars and avid readers of Didion will not find new information here. But it’s a worthy collection nonetheless because it works like a skeleton key to unlock Didion’s continued significance in American culture. What has made her so lasting and important to so many? Why are we still talking about her and reading her and teaching her writing in classrooms? The book unpacks this legacy subtly, in a way as twofold as its title: Because she means things, and because she means something.

In each essay, Didion is explaining what she means when she says things, often things that shock or intrigue. “The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are The Wall Street Journal , the Los Angeles Free Press , the Los Angeles Open City , and the East Village Other ,” begins her 1968 essay “Alicia and the Underground Press.” Didion rushes to assure us that she’s not trying to “make myself out an amusing eccentric, perverse and eclectic and, well, groovy in all her tastes”; instead, she is lamenting the “inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way, the failure of American newspapers to ‘get through,’” and the way the fiction of objectivity strangles journalism. And then she goes on to tell us what she means by that .

Saying things, then clarifying them, is evidence of Didion’s precision, her need to make sure she reveals only what she wants to and not a bit more, that the words she chooses do exactly what she means for them to do. For Didion, sloppy writing is sloppy thinking, on the border of being immoral. When she made the pivot to writing about politics in the 1980s, she frequently focused not only on what people, especially politicians and pundits, were saying to the public, but on the way they said it, and the meaning they tried to repress in their rhetoric. And she holds herself to the same standard. “The whole meaning of anything for me is in the grammar,” she told an interviewer in 2002. “It doesn’t mean anything until I’ve written it. I don’t have a lot of thoughts. They don’t form until I’ve written it down. So the process of writing is the process of thinking.”

The effort Didion devotes to making herself clear is somewhat ironic, since her most-quoted line ever — the first sentence in her 1979 essay “The White Album,” which is “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — is also her most misquoted. Often it’s brought up as an inspirational bon mot for aspiring writers, an exhortation to keep telling stories so that we can keep living. In fact, it’s the opening salvo in a devastating passage arguing that this storytelling impulse fools us into believing that life makes sense, when, if we looked at it with scrutiny, we’d know the appropriate response to life is “an attack of vertigo and nausea.” By the end of the essay, Didion has told many stories, but she says that “writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.”

But the essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean aren’t just about Didion clarifying her thoughts while readers look on. Taken together, they reveal how she is trying to interpret — by writing about others, mostly — what she herself actually means to us . In “Everywoman.com,” a 2000 essay about Martha Stewart’s personal brand and the fandom it spawned, she writes a telling passage:

The “cultural meaning” of Martha Stewart’s success, in other words, lies deep in the success itself, which is why even her troubles and strivings are part of the message, not detrimental but integral to the brand. She has branded herself not as Superwoman but as Everywoman, a distinction that seems to remain unclear to her critics.

The tell is in the essay’s last paragraph, where she observes that Stewart’s story is a “‘woman’s pluck story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story.” For nearly her whole career, Didion has drawn on those same pioneer narratives to explain her entire self-conception, as a descendant of pioneer women who came to California. She is writing, at least a little, about herself. And that makes the kicker even more significant: “The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips,” she writes.

That seems faintly self-aware. Famously reticent to describe herself as “a feminist,” Didion seems to have tapped into this same version of female power that she ascribes to Stewart. She is, on the one hand, the writer who seems fragile and reserved, even the woman trembling in the Berkeley bathroom — the Everywoman. In her later years, she is the woman left alone by the untimely deaths of her husband and daughter, losses she tries to process in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights with extraordinary vulnerability. She wants to make sure we know she doesn’t think she is special.

On the other hand, she is the writer who can practically disembowel a politician or pundit’s bad reasoning, take apart a brainless movie or book, or reduce a pompous public figure to a hollow shell, and that’s why writers love her or fear her. Words are her scalpels. In an essay in Let Me Tell You What I Mean titled “On Stories,” she writes that at her first job at Vogue writing merchandising and promotion copy, “I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.”

Not everyone learns to write like that. It’s a sort of Superwoman ability. Couple it with the surprisingly controlled iconography she’s let out into the world — the photo of herself with a cigarette , one arm crossed over her waistline; the photo of herself with a cigarette and her Corvette ; the modeling work for Celine — and it’s no wonder that some of her fans worship her for what they think she means, even if they don’t always cop to what she means .

Why does Joan Didion matter? Because she has chronicled, for well over half a century, how the powerful use words to obscure meaning. How lies get dressed up as truth. How we all submit to magical thinking when confronted with the inexplicable or the frightening. How we make up stories to convince ourselves that we have everything under control, how we spin webs of meaning from words and sentences and turns of phrase.

How we write to find out what we mean.

How we need, wisely or not, figures who can make meaning for us out of chaos.

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Ninjas of Nonfiction #4: Joan Didion

At the tender age of 22, Joan Didion won a Vogue essay contest. It was 1956, decades before the advent of reality-based meritocratic TV job competitions that are so familiar to us today. Nevertheless, her prize was a job at the magazine, and a cross-country move, from her home state of California to New York. During her years in NY, she met the man who would be her husband for 4 decades, and she eventually moved back to California with him. She had a job in New York, writing for Vogue before she graduated from university. With her first collection of nonfiction essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem,  she became a star of New Journalism, the subjective style that started in 1973 and changed nonfiction writing forever.

And if that was all you knew of Didion, if you have never read her essays or memoirs, you would think she had a charmed life.

But in her nonfiction, her essays and memoirs, you meet a woman much more ordinary, a person who struggles with worry and self-doubt, enough to know what it means when you’re up all night, wincing through memories of the times you’ve done wrong. In her stark and severe essay On Self Respect, she strides (rather than wanders) through embarrassment and cowardice to one of the clearest statements regarding human society I’ve ever read: “The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who are, after all, deceived easily enough…”

This sort of sharp clarity especially marks Didion’s early essays. In Marrying Absurd , an 1967 essay about the Las Vegas wedding industry, her writing draws us quickly into the frankly bizarre situation that is Las Vegas. There is no rambling about with her. She is in Las Vegas, where there is no sense of time and “… neither is there any logical sense of where one is. One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks ‘STARDUST’ or ‘CAESAR’S PALACE.’ Yes, but what does that explain?” Her style is so immediate. When I read this sentence, I am on the highway with her. I am exasperated with her.

And the clarity of her writing only accentuates her deep, critical analysis. Didion is a tough thinker. When I first read The Women’s Movement , her eviscerating less-than-five-page dismantling of all second-wave feminism, I was maybe 23 years old. I knew something was wrong with feminism when it seemed to be so trivial. Whether or not a woman changed her surname and how many times she had to do the washing up per week never piqued my interest. In this essay, Didion breaks down the problem of second-wave with sarcasm so sour, it stings.

Her most recent memoirs sting, too, but in an entirely different way. The Year of Magical Thinking is about the year Didion spent mourning her husband and taking care of her daughter through a life-threatening illness. Joan Didion’s ability to stare unflinching at the hardest, most terrifying parts of life, is what makes her writing so important. No one else does quite what she does. And she thinks hard. And through reading her work, you can tell that didn’t come easy. To think she’s had a charmed life is to be what she never is: a soft, unclear thinker.

Joan Didion’s books and essay collections are available just about everywhere. The essays mentioned in this article can all be found on this fantastic website , which is quickly becoming a favourite haunt of mine.

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On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue

https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961

I saw it recommended in the sub a while back and I had it in my bookmarks. Just read it there and I thought it was worth sharing. Last 2 paragraphs strike me as particularly insightful.

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Premium Content: Alissa Wilkinson’s upcoming book explores Joan Didion’s legacy in Hollywood and American politics

The new york times film critic talks about cultural criticism, didion and her unexpected path to a career in media, august 27, 2024 mandie-beth chau.

Joan Didion is a well-covered subject, but Wilkinson’s book approaches Didion’s work with a fresh perspective. Wilkinson tackles two topics she’s extremely familiar with: cultural evolution and the figures involved in it. 

Wilkinson said the book is unique from other Didion biographies because “I’m not interested in her public image as ‘Joan: the lady on the tote bag,’ so much as ‘Joan: the thinker,’ and how her eyes give us a good lens to look at a century of American history through what was happening.” 

As many do, Wilkinson encountered Didion when she first moved to New York City. 

“The first Didion book I ever read was ‘The Year of Magical Thinking.’ I was moving to New York right when the book won the National Book Award, and I was like, ‘Who’s this Didion lady on the subway ads?’” said Wilkinson. “My father died right after I got to New York, and it was quite sudden, and he was very young. That sense of shock that she experienced in that book was something I was extremely familiar with. The book was very moving to me.”

After encountering Didion through “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Wilkinson delved into Didion’s larger body of work.

“I didn’t study literature in undergrad, and I wasn’t familiar with her, so I went back and read ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem,’ ‘The White Album,’ the greatest hits; everybody reads ‘Goodbye to All That’ when they first move here, especially if they’re 21 like I was,” said Wilkinson. “I taught English, and then I got an MFA, so I certainly read some of her works. The ones I hadn’t read were the ones that I became very attached to. One was ‘Political Fictions’ — an incredible book. I remember that era of politics, even though I was a kid. That was really remarkable as a book, and then her novel ‘Democracy.’ I read it four times, and I think it might be The Great American Novel.”

In 2020, Wilkinson sought out a fresh perspective on Didion’s work that she could use for a book. As she explored Didion’s often-overlooked Hollywood era, Wilkinson began connecting the dots between Didion’s work in entertainment and her evolution as a political writer. 

“I was thinking of it as ‘Joan Didion in Hollywood,’ but it expanded. The history of Hollywood is well-trodden territory, but instead, I focused on the history of Hollywood and how Americans’ fixation on-screen presence and celebrity has affected the way our politics developed over time,” said Wilkinson. “In 1980 we elected a movie star president. Now — well, you can see what has happened. That was an interesting story to tell. The more I read Didion, I realized that she was tuned into that and even wrote about it explicitly in her political writing in the 1990s. Once I realized that she was obsessed with John Wayne from a very young age, I realized there was a whole story to tell about America, Hollywood and Joan Didion from 1934 when she was born to the early 21st century.”

Didion, along with her husband John Gregory Dunne, was a prominent figure in Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s. Didion was plugged into elite social circles and worked as a screenwriter. Her movie work includes iconic films such as “Panic in Needle Park” and “Play It as It Lays.” 

Wilkinson’s book delves into Didion’s buried Hollywood life and connects it to her later political work and American culture. It’s titled after a well-known but often misunderstood quote from Didion about the impulse to be entertained rather than face the truth.

Didion’s disdain for the ‘Hollywoodization’ of politics

Wilkinson’s book features an entire chapter on Didion’s little-known stint as a film critic for Vogue. Wilkinson said the reviews were telling of Didion’s political and social beliefs; Didion’s taste in movies compared to her taste in politics set a clear example of Didion’s evolution as a political writer and cultural figure.

“Because I was writing about her connection to movies, specifically, I realized that she had been a film critic in the early 1960s for Vogue magazine . When she was in New York, she shared a column with Pauline Kael, who became the legendary New Yorker film critic,” said Wilkinson. “Reading them was interesting because as a film critic, I agree with almost none of her opinions, her reviews aren’t that deep, and they’re quite short. She clearly wasn’t trying to do the kind of film criticism that I’m trying to do, but it’s very revealing of her opinions .”  

Wilkinson discovered that Didion believed that the glitz and glamor of Hollywood should stay out of politics. 

“In the Reagans, she saw people who treated politics as if it was show business, all about appearances, not about substance, and she hated it enough to switch parties over it. She registered as a Democrat because she didn’t like this, and she saw them as thinking of themselves as stage-managed,” said Wilkinson. “When you read her political writing from the 1980s onward, I wouldn’t say she ever became a liberal, but she very much opposed what she saw as the shift towards show business in politics, not only on the right.” 

Didion’s political writing became increasingly cynical during the Reagan administration which led to some of her most biting and insightful work. Wilkinson described Didion’s vitriol for figures like Newt Gingrich, and how “all of Didion’s most interesting writing is about Ronald Reagan because she hated him, and she hated Nancy Reagan. The meanest thing she ever wrote was about Nancy Reagan. It bothered Nancy Reagan so much that she mentioned it in her memoir years later.”

A non-traditional path to media

Wilkinson joined the New York Times as a film critic in December 2023 and previously wrote for Vox as a senior film critic. Wilkinson will also teach at New York University’s XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement program in the spring of 2025. 

Before emerging in media, Wilkinson studied information technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an undergraduate and worked at an investment bank when she first moved to New York in 2005. 

“When I moved to New York and started working at the investment bank, I quickly realized I had little to do during the day. They were like, ‘Why don’t you process this data?’ And it took one hour a day, and I was bored out of my head,” said Wilkinson. “I was sitting at my desk all day long, bored out of my head, and I felt like I was disappearing. I thought, ‘How hard could it be to write articles for websites?’ That was my entire thought. I Googled ‘How do you write articles for websites?’ And I learned how to pitch from that.” 

Wilkinson started freelancing and blogging. She then studied humanities in graduate school and taught media and cultural studies at The King’s College for 14 years while writing criticism. 

“I came at it completely wrong — I have no background in this stuff . Eventually, I was like, ‘If I can do this, I can probably do the media job, right?’” said Wilkinson. “It was a matter of falling in love with magazines more than newspapers, which I recognize is very ironic at this point. Magazines were a place to have a personality as a writer, to have expansive ideas, and not have to cover news. You saw a movie that was interesting , and then you wrote something about it, and other people who saw the movie were also interested in that.”

Now at the Times since December 2023, Wilkinson is an established voice in media and cultural criticism. Wilkinson’s experience spans teaching, writing, speaking, serving on juries at film festivals including Sundance, and more. Wilkinson noted that the Times’ investment in criticism is a beacon of hope for writers like herself.

“Something that made me happy about the Times was that A.O. Scott had this job, and he moved over to Book Review, and most publications in the world would not refill that position at this point, and would have moved to using freelancers,” said Wilkinson. “The Times values criticism enough that they’ve expanded their stable of critics over the past eight years, recognizing that not only is this something that people want to read, but it’s something worth investing in for history’s sake. Also, the Times chose to have two female critics, and that’s rare.” 

The importance of criticism

Wilkinson noted that there are increasingly fewer critics as publications find less value in the dying art, but she has a few reasons why criticism should be preserved. Criticism is commonly misunderstood as critical or a summation of other people’s creativity, but Wilkinson describes it as a separate creative work.

“A big reason cultural criticism is mocked is because the word critic is so close to criticize, but they’re not the same thing. Anybody can, ‘be a critic’ by going on Letterboxd or whatever, but it’s best to think about criticism as a sub-genre of creative writing,” said Wilkinson. “I’ve often thought about it as ekphrastic writing, a very, very old genre of writing that originated with the Greeks. You couldn’t go see this vase, but I could, as a poet, describe it very closely, and then you would feel as if you had seen it but also, I’ve written a poem, so it’s two things going on there.”

Wilkinson’s approach to criticism as a type of creative writing is something she plans to teach at a writing workshop at Brooklyn’s Center for Fiction this fall, called “Expanding the World: The Review as Creative Writing.” She is also teaching a workshop based on her research on Didion’s work, “How She Wrote: Discovering Joan Didion’s Craft.”  

“You have to describe the thing you’re writing about enough that someone can get the gist of it. There is a service aspect to it, where someone who reads a review might be wanting to know if they should see the thing,” said Wilkinson. “The movie’s the coffee grounds, and I’m the coffee filter, and then hopefully the review is the nice cup of coffee you drink and enjoy, where it’s been filtered through me.”

Wilkinson said people need critics to help them sort out their feelings about media, especially movies.

“There are critics I read who I think are insane, but I love them, and I think their work is beautifully written and instructive to me because I would never see it that way,” said Wilkinson. “Then there are other people I read because I agree with them, and they help me sort out my feelings about something.”

Wilkinson said criticism is a necessary field because of its historical significance. Part of why Wilkinson is teaching the writing workshop on reviews at the Center for Fiction is because she hopes more people will learn how to write a good review for posterity. 

“Being at the Times and writing the book, criticism has been important because I need to know how people responded to a movie at the time it was released because a movie is a product of its moment, but it also is the same movie 50 years later,” said Wilkinson. “I need to know what they thought in 1971, and we don’t have a record of that if critics aren’t doing their job. It matters to history.”

“We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine” is available for pre-order and will be available in March 2025. Read more of Wilkinson’s work at the New York Times.

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