December 23, 2021 - 11:21pm
How can a woman writer be appealing? She can’t really be an “intellectual,” at least not without being entirely desexed (Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt). She can’t be “funny” — no one really buys that women are funny. She can be emotional, but she might end up like an Elizabeth Wurtzel: laughable to the point of indecency.
The answer, of course, comes from Joan Didion, who died today at the age of 87. Didion was not beautiful, not sexy, but glamorous. That’s what she was: glamorous, with her Corvette Stingray and her icicle limbs and her cigarettes and leotards and mohair and bourbon and Dexedrine and despair. There was something transcendent about her, like she’d managed to forget she was a woman, even as she was fashionable and married and almost sociopathically attuned to the niceties of dress and decoration. There was sadness, there, too, like a bleeding vein across the page. But she was so hardened, so clear-eyed, that she didn’t feel like a “woman writer.” When Interview Magazine asked her, “Why can’t it just be magic all the time?”, she said, “What.” You couldn’t imagine seducing Joan Didion.
Like everybody else, I wanted to be Joan Didion. Like everybody else, I started with Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I was a young woman in Florida; she’d been a young woman in California. We were both from places where there were bougainvilleas and palm trees and sunshine and a sense that the world was just beginning to lose its meaning. We were from places on the edge of the country that seemed sinister and malformed, as if the sunnier a place was, the more cracks in the surface you could see. In her Berkeley address “Why I Write,” she said she wrote only to answer the question: “What is going on in these pictures in my mind?,” those images — burning oil refineries in the Carquinez Strait, the lights in the Bevatron particle accelerator — that “shimmer around the edges” like Louis Wain’s cats as he slid into schizophrenia. For a young girl who wrote almost nothing and was convinced she was a writer, who had learned in AP government that we were living in “the end of history,” it was intoxicating: Didion could make the meaninglessness matter.
In “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” the Haight-Ashbury wasn’t a free-love utopia; it was a nightmare of stoned children and kitchen fires and teenage girls raffled off by dealers. In “Goodbye to All That,” New York was the paradise where “I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.” Later, it became the place where “Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen.” Her most famous essays were written by a very young woman in a youth-obsessed time who knew that if youth is the prize, you’re always going to lose.
She was no dupe. “I still believed in possibilities then,” she wrote in the same essay. How did it feel to read that, as a twenty-something myself? It was like she was cutting through the noise. The Obama years were a sort of ‘60s-redux; we were told that this time, liberation really was coming. In 2008, the slogans were “Yes We Can,” “Hope,” and, simply, “Change.” As a woman, with Bush out of office and the era of purity rings at a close, you were told that the best thing to do was put out. And yet nothing seemed to change. Women seemed to feel sad exactly as before, but also to feel stupid for feeling sad.
Reading Didion on the ‘60s, it felt like she was the first It-Girl to tell it like it was: “I still believed in possibilities then,” she wrote of herself in her early 20s. Reading her at the edge of the world, in bright sunlight, in a time of drone strikes and bank collapse and the most inspiring president in American history, I began not to believe in them.
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SubscribeWas Obama really the most inspiring president in US history? He just had a lot of glittering generalities for his first campaign, and a Republican opponent who made some serious blunders in his second. In between, his instincts were pretty much boilerplate progressive politics of this era, which much of the US loathes. I call him a mediocre POTUS at best.
He was a great orator and the optics were good. That is enough for many people… including the author it seems.
I too liked Joan Didion and read everything she wrote. I must have started reading her around the time I saw the film Nashville, and always associate the two.
But there were other glamorous women writers (Barbara Skelton?) and there are intellectual writers who could not be desexed (Germaine Greer: intellectual and entertainer). The original It Girl might have been Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – a good read, funny, and James Joyce liked it). But I also think of Martha Gellhorn, Mary McCarthy and so many others. And of course there are funny women writers – I read Margaret Drabble from her first book to her last, and those first books were hilarious. Anne Tyler was also pretty good at light-hearted, amusing novels. Nancy Mitford – funny and glamorous??
Beryl Bainbridge…
I immediately had to Google Quintana Roo (I have been there). What a sad loss for Didion… a husband and a child gone within two years.
For some reason, I never thought of Joan Didion as a “woman writer.” She was simply a great writer and wrote about the world as it was, not as it should be. But was she “glamorous?” It depends on your definition I guess. If you take the modern definition of “a beautiful woman who wears sexy and attractive clothing and makeup” I’m not so sure. To me, you need a very old definition that defines glamorous as “the mysterious allure of youth,” the way Joseph Conrad used it in his great short story “Youth.’ This is how I saw Joan Didion. This is why I fell in love with her writing. It was something mysterious in her writing, her detachment, her ability to stand ten feet away from a 10-year-old child taking LSD and not interfering but to place us there to experience it. This was the allure that kept me coming back to her writing and to her.