(via The Cut, NYMag)
“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.”
I’m not sure Joan Didion has the weight for the young that she did for those of us growing up feminist in the 1970s, but I suspect I wasn’t the only woman here who copied out chunks of her essays to post over our desks in college. The Kickstarter is oversubscribed, but I kicked in $15 to get a digital copy of the finished film, if only to add one more name to the list of those letting Ms. Didion know how much she meant to us.
More detail from NYMag‘s Vulture blog:
…[T]he doc will alternate old photos of Didion with snippets of her reading selected passages (illustrated with gauzy stock footage), interspersed with newsreel-style coverage of the political upheavals she covered and talking heads like Patti Smith, Liam Neeson, Jann Wenner, Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter, and the camera-shy Times critic Michiko Kakutani. Those names (and the fabulous yellow Corvette Stingray in the freeze-frame) promise to give us a sense of the glamorous swirl in which Didion and John Gregory Dunne led their lives — role models of high living, hard work, and lasting marriage who made it look easy and fun…
SiubhanDuinne
Likewise. I hadn’t even heard about this. Thanks, AL.
Jamey
Stuff White People Like…
Baud
@Jamey:
Huh?
Starfish
Her essays were still in the 101 level writing classes in the mid-1990s.
Rusty
I liked Griffin Dunne for years in films, but he has seemed to have drop off the map. I had no idea he was related to Joan Didion. This looks very good.
Corner Stone
@Jamey:
Ok, I’ll play! Stuff like what?
Anoniminous
Cue a neckbearded Cheeto® huffing Mountain Dew® swilling dudebro grandly informing us that Feminists are the Real Sexists©
(I, for one, can hardly wait.)
FlipYrWhig
@Jamey: @Corner Stone: Stuff White People Like Chicken Cordon Bleu. It’s a tasty preparation.
trollhattan
@Corner Stone:
Perhaps stuff like her childhood home?
Rusty
Turns out I couldn’t be more wrong. Checking IMDB, Griffin Dunne seems to have stayed very active. I just can’t recall seeing him in anything since American Werewolf in London, and Scorcese’s After Hours.
Corner Stone
@Anoniminous: Don’t have a neckbeard but I, for one, am pretty cheesed off about all the damn thespians around this area.
Baud
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s a cookbook!
Corner Stone
@trollhattan: You’re right! I’m White People and I like that house lots!
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I kind of agree with Jamey here — Didion was very good at articulating the feminist issues that existed for white, middle-class women and wrote about them very well, but she doesn’t always translate for everyone else.
On the other hand, John Gregory Dunne’s book about their Hollywood experiences, “Monster,” is a classic of that genre. The subplot about his years’ long fight to get a royalty payment from Universal — a payment that even Universal’s own lawyers admitted was owed — explains what a writer’s life is really like in Hollywood. Which, again, could be fairly called a White Person’s Problem (though it’s getting better).
PurpleGirl
Back in the day I didn’t read any of Didion’s writings. Maybe it’s time I should. Actually I didn’t read much of the feminists at the time. I was rather living and seeing certain aspects of the issue at home and growing in my feminist thought that way. My father was a Germanic Edwardian patriarch and my mother conformed her life to make him happy. I didn’t like how that looked and made me feel.
PurpleGirl
@Corner Stone: That house is beautiful.
Cervantes
@trollhattan:
Not really her childhood home: while in high school, she lived there for a couple of years with her aunt.
In fact I’m not sure I’d say she had a childhood home at all, as the family moved around quite a bit.
Pogonip
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Thirded. Rich people problems. She did write well about the rich people problems, but who gives a rat’s ass?
Try Barbara Ehrenreich. She’s also of the SWPL class but writes well about everybody else.
Cervantes
@Corner Stone:
@PurpleGirl:
It is, indeed, a nice house. Oddly enough, that part of town is called Poverty Ridge.
divF
@PurpleGirl: Didion has been one of my favorite writers. She has a capability to evoke a time and place, that I found both vivid and compelling. It may have been a narrow slice – primarily white California – but she captured the social upheavals that slice underwent from the 40s to the 70s. If you haven’t read anything by her, start with the first two collections of her short nonfiction, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album”.
I tend to re-read California writers, trying to understand how my adopted home came to be what it is. A shortish list includes Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, John Steinbeck (fiction); and Carey McWilliams and Mike Davis (nonfiction). I’ve seen Richard Rodriguez’ work in collections, and want to read more.
replicnt6
@divF:
Seconded. Particularly the recommendation to start with “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album”. Her essays have always blown me away.
I’ve always thought that her ability to capture a place or a feeling in a sentence or two was what poetry must be like for people that get poetry (i.e., not me).
dance around in your bones
I read everything by Joan Didion – she was wonderful. In addition to the two books mentioned above, I would also recommend “The Year Of Magical Thinking” which is about her husband dying and her daughter getting seriously ill.
I know, even back in the day, that people criticized her for writing about rich white women. Well, I’m not sure how she would have written about a poor black or brown woman if she hadn’t walked the walk.
One cannot be all things to all people.
Steeplejack
@divF:
Other California crime writers I like are Ross Macdonald and Joseph Hansen. Macdonald is old-school; his detective is Lew Archer, sort of a ’50s-60s successor to Philip Marlowe. The Moving Target, The Drowning Pool et seq. Hansen had a dozen novels from 1970 to about 1990 starring Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator who happens to be gay—Fadeout, Death Claims, Troublemaker et seq. All available on Kindle and Nook. Loaded with period California detail with a (then) unique perspective. I need to go back and see how those hold up.
I like Mike Davis, too.
Pogonip
@dance around in your bones: Well, she could always have interviewed the maid and gone from there.
Steve from Antioch
She’s a fantastic writer. And she and her husband made up the sort of smart, literary couple what weren’t afraid to engage the world that you’d don’t see anymore.
I’m heading over to kickstarted, and I think I’ll spring to get a couple of her titles on kindle even though I already have them on paper. I haven’t read her in a while.
Thanks for the reminder.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Pogonip:
I’m actually okay with rich white people writing about their problems — it helps destroy the myths that money can solve all problems and that rich people are in any way morally better than the rest of us. As far as I know, Didion never made the mistake of claiming that her problems or experiences were somehow universal as other writers of that era sometimes did. She just wrote about the people and places that she knew.
dance around in your bones
@Pogonip: Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Yeah, she could have. And then gotten criticized for writing about something she didn’t know jackshit about.
Don’t “they” always say ‘write about what you know’ ?
Excuse me, you were probably being snarky and I’m being cranky ;)
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Pogonip:
Not every writer is Studs Terkel. If you’re not careful, you can fall into Concerned White Person territory, which is even worse.
Cervantes
Re @dance around in your bones:
And @dance around in your bones:
Have you read what she wrote about the Black Panthers?
Or about campus activism in the age of Hayakawa and Reagan?
Corner Stone
@dance around in your bones: That was a significant chunk of snark by Pogonip.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Brought this up with my husband and he reminded me that Didion was one of the first people to say that there was something odd about the Central Park Jogger case and that Didion didn’t think the teens charged with the crime were guilty while they were in the process of being railroaded. So that’s a point in her favor.
dance around in your bones
@Cervantes: Yes, I did.
dance around in your bones
@Corner Stone: I realized that halfway through my rant.
Been a long day, still adjusting to my new job and living situation, which – oddly enough – is with a very wealthy white woman.
Steve from Antioch
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I am sure that Ms. Didion will appreciate you granting her this point.
As for her “not claiming that her problems or experiences were universal” that is probably technically true since she is neither boorish nor dumb enough to make such a intellectually lazy statement. But if you have more than a glancing familiarity with her work, you would know that she grappled with just about every universal experience you can think of: loss (death of parent, husband, child), love, sex, money, corruption, growing old, realizing you’ve been living the life you are _supposed_ to lead rather than the one you are leading, and so forth.
Finally, you say “Not every writer is Studs Terkel. If you’re not careful, you can fall into Concerned White Person territory, which is even worse.” Maybe you should sit down and read Miami – which is a whole fucking book she wrote about something other than “white people” (as you use the term.) Then, maybe you can see if you give her any points for not falling into Concerned Whiter Person territory.
Corner Stone
@dance around in your bones: I’m still kind of recovering, too, from when you broke my heart a little by acting like I would say something damaging about you.
Cervantes
@dance around in your bones:
And in those instances — Huey Newton, campus activists, radical activism in the ’60s generally — is she writing about what she knows?
And regardless, what is her message?
Contents of her medicine cabinet aside, Didion frequently tells us how futile it is to struggle for meaning. Don’t ask, she says, over and over in her work. Questions are futile — and particularly from the left.
dance around in your bones
@Corner Stone: Oh, sugar – I apologize.
I was prolly cranky that day, too. But I have noticed that lately you aren’t doing so much of those rage-filled comments? Have you cut down the drinking, a la Cole?
I’m sorry if I just hurt your feelings again.
dance around in your bones
@Cervantes: No, I think she was writing about what she experienced – personally, either in person or through what she read.
Which is what many writers do, especially in the essay form, or memoirs. Very creative writers can invent whole worlds peopled with believable characters who you come to care about (or despise) despite them being wholly fictional.
She was a wonderful writer, writing about her personal experiences and feelings and sometimes applying them to all of humanity, sometimes to her own “class” as they say, even though we are not supposed to be a class-based society. (muffled guffaw)
Corner Stone
@dance around in your bones: I don’t know why I try to be nice to you. You’re so insensitive and hurtful.
I guess I’ll never learn my lesson with extending kindness to others when they’re determined to damage me.
dance around in your bones
@Corner Stone: Me? Insensitive and hurtful??!!
Some of my friends call me cynical, but – you know – the facts are out there to support my cynicism.
But I have a very deep empathy for others and a big generous heart. You are welcome to share it with me :)
I promise I won’t insult you again. Remember how we both share a love for Modelo Negro? That came up in a football thread that I was inexplicably following. You high-fived me on my choice of beers :)
E.
Good lord this is an annoying thread. Take her or leave her but if after reading her you cannot recognize the power of a writer who truly tried to see clearly, and write clearly, and say what she saw without regard for how it might play in Peoria, then you just aren’t paying attention.
El Caganer
I’ve never read anything by her, but, hey, it’s a slow evening here – I’m prepared to get outraged if somebody will point me in the right direction.
sharl
Hmm, weird vibes in these here comments over this author. Not to worry, plenty of other quality writers out there!
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@dance around in your bones:
It’s also a bit of second wave vs. third wave feminism. Didion is four years older than my father was, so I don’t entirely relate to what she wrote about and I understand why some feminists of color aren’t big on what she had to say.
(I had to type that three times because I kept mistyping “feminist” as “felinist.” Have I
mentioned today that moving sucks?)
aimai
@E.: Right this. I don’t know why people feel they have to have an opinion about a writer they don’t have an opinion on. If she didn’t speak to you then leave her alone. And stop trying to make your distaste for the people who did read her an excuse for retconning your distaste into a political statement. She was no worse and substantially better than other people of her social class at the time. She was in her time and wrote of her time. White feminists of that generation aren’t some kind of super-predator/super white bitch. They were just ordinary people and sometimes excellent writers or political activists who couldn’t necessarily break all the rules at the same time. What else is new? I find it amazing that white feminists come in for more hate and more agressive shit than the men who they were divorcing and the white masters of the universe who were running things. Its such a displacement of anger from the real targets to somethign that, I think, seems easy and vulnerable and not scary.
pseudonymous in nc
@Pogonip:
Gotta start somewhere. Like it or not, but most cultural critiques start from a position of privilege.
Steeplejack
@aimai:
Well said.
dance around in your bones
@Steeplejack: seconded.
Aimai is quite eloquent.
Cervantes
@aimai:
Under this rule, Leon Uris or P. D. James might have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and we’d all be none the wiser.
Cervantes
@pseudonymous in nc:
Sure, but it is what the critique says, and does not say, that matters.
Cervantes
@aimai:
Is someone bothering you with opinions they don’t have? What does this wide-eyed bewilderment even mean?
Responded to this above already — but let’s not forget that it’s a rule Didion herself — not to mention any sentient being — would find ludicrous. When, for example, Joan felt that Bob Woodward wasn’t speaking to her (to use your locution), here’s what she said:
She found Woodward’s writing vacuous — so did she simply leave him alone? Not by a long shot. Should she have? I think not — and neither do you, I imagine.
She was criticized by numerous people “in her time and of her time” who, while they agreed that she could definitely turn a phrase (laughably hyperbolic and over-dramatized or otherwise), still found her analysis of certain things trivial, or lazy, or in deeper ways phony.
Some argued even then, as apparently some are trying to still, that so long as Didion did not venture into “larger issues” and only wrote about things she knew from personal experience (“SWPL”), there was no harm done. That defense in itself is debatable — she wrote lots of little things about California, say, that are truly memorable but not particularly true.
But the thing is, she did not prudently limit herself. She deigned to “report” on things she did not even pretend to understand; and it certainly appeared that her sole reason for writing about them was to dismiss them, nervously.
I’ve already mentioned her writing about the Black Panthers, about campus activism in the ’60s, about radical activism generally. What do you think she understood about those things? Remember, this is a woman who voted proudly for Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Nor did she stop there, eventually collecting a number of her later essays in Political Fictions (2001). If you can read those essays and find in them any useful analysis, let me know. Meanwhile I’m with Ellen Willis (late of NYU), whose review states:
That’s Ellen Willis, in “From Democracy to Demagogy,” Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 19, Issue 2 (November 2001).
Or as I said in fewer words last night, “Don’t ask, [Didion] says, over and over in her work. Questions are futile — and particularly from the left.”
I have no idea what you’re talking about here. Suppose you were to write an encomium to, say, John Updike. What do you think the responses might include?
Cervantes
@E.:
Isn’t it, though?
Yes, I am sure that’s the only conclusion you can draw.
g
@Pogonip: Show us your accomplishments, then.
El Caganer
This whole thread is a reminder why I don’t usually read literary essays. These essays consist of a writer’s observations and (sometimes) meditations on such observations concerning an event, a state of mind, or some other facet of existence that has caught the writer’s attention. While such observations and meditations can be thrilling and stimulating, and expressed in gorgeous language, they don’t necessarily reflect anything real or true.
I guess my view of such essays is best expressed in the words of that noted American philosopher, Jeffrey Lebowski: “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
Rex Everything
Joan Didion is a national treasure.
mclaren
@Baud:
Here’s why “Huh?”: the two most despairing words in the English language are “Joan Didion.”
She writes endlessly depressing screeds about overprivileged white people suffering from the terrible existential ennui of having lots of money and living sheltered lives in high-end suburbia.
Her unreadble 1970 novel Play It As It Lays gets this summary in Wikipedia:
And that’s about the first 20 pages. It gets more depressing and more unreadable from there.
Everybody in Didion-land is suicidal, molested as a child, brutalized, psychologically tortured by a parent or a relative, subjected to repeated rape, personal physical attacks, and constant humiliation. Everyone in Didion-land spends their lives shuttling between tony ultra-high-priced psychiatric facilities where ignorant incomptent psychologists subject them to various forms of torture including electroconvulsive therapy, drugs like haldol and thalidomide that turn them into zombies, and continual humiliating talk “therapy,” and instances of cruel personal emotional torment by their lovers, their bosses, their professional peers at universities, and so on.
Everyone in Didion-land drifts through life as a passive helpless victim, unable to lift a finger to change their life or do anything to stop the unending shitshow of degradation and humiliation and brutalization. Everyone in Didion-land spends essentially all their time lamenting their existence in a hyper-literate display of nauseating self-pity and infantile passive-aggressive whimpering instead of doing even the slightest goddamn thing to change their miserable lives.
This is not a planet I’m familiar with. Joan Didion’s scribbling will be extremely popular with neurotic neurasthenic infantilized professional victims like herself: the rest of us read the first five pages of a Joan Didion book, snort, “Hey, babe, if you tried spending 3 days in the goddamn ghetto as a black person you’d get a clue what humiliation and degredation and despair really mean, so pull your fuckin’ socks up and get a life, you white entitled self-pitying loser,” and hurl the book into the nearest trashcan.