Joan Didion died before I could scratch up the nerve to send her some of the essays I received from the students to whom I assigned the essay “After Life.” I hadn’t been a long-time Joan Didion fan, but a recent one, if by recent you understand I mean in the last decade or so. It was The Year of Magical Thinking, read when it didn’t really mean anything to me, that hooked me. The “After Life” essay was adapted from that book. It was so powerfully and beautifully written, I became smitten with her work. After that book, I mostly sought out her essays—deep dives into thought and experience composed of words that grabbed my attention and made me envious and captivated. When I assigned that essay to my students, I wasn’t sure if they’d “get it,” but their grasp of her work and insightful responses proved me wrong. I wanted to send all of them to her.
But I didn’t. I thought about it and thought about it and then the semester was over and I forgot about it. Then, a few months later, she died. Her death shook me, even as a relatively new fan, because I had just been immersed in her work and its impact on others. I promised myself to get a couple of her books as a tribute.
I forgot to do that, too.
But recently, Joan Didion is back in my realm of consciousness. She arrived first in the form of a story on one of my favorite podcasts, Tiny Victories. One of the co-hosts, Annabelle Gurwitch attended an exhibit of her life at the Hammer Museum in LA. The way she described it made me wish I lived there and could go myself. And then she read a quote from the exhibit that she said was an example of incredible thinking:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...[We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.] We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do so for awhile. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premise of all the stories I ever told to myself. A common condition but one I found troubling.” *
Within a day, a story popped up in my New York Times app about the New York Public Library’s acquisition of the joint archive of Joan Didion and husband John Gregory Dunne. It’s a fascinating collection of professional and personal work; research, handwritten notes to and from Didion and dinner party menus, to name just a few items. Archives of well-known writers always entrance me because I’m nosy by nature and looking at old photos, their to-do lists, imagining their hands holding the pens that scribble the notes in the margins is thrilling to me. (I’m a cheap date—just take me to a library exhibit of an author and I’m in heaven.)
Following that article, the day of my book club meeting arrived, the one where we all were going to share a book we were reading. I still didn’t have one, partially because of my Reader’s Block, and mostly because I wasn’t actually reading a book. And then it came to me: I would share The Year of Magical Thinking. I wasn’t reading it, but with all the nudges from the universe, I felt I should read it again. And it’s now on the table next to my recliner so I won’t forget.
It's no surprise that Joan Didion has been hovering in the back of my consciousness as I grapple with Annie’s cancer and prognosis. I have an on-again, off-again relationship with Didion’s work and I’ve written about it before; how sometimes I think I’m just like her (I’m not) and other times I feel like I’ll never achieve what she had (I won’t). But her writing provides true and lingering advice, some that I go back to again and again.
“It all comes back. . . . 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. 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.” **
I could have easily missed both the podcast and the Times article, but I believe both showed up to remind me of just that—keep on nodding terms with the person—and writer—I used to be. Writing through the experiences of our lives is what I teach and what I do for myself. In this one instance, I practice what I preach. I’m looking to Joan to keep me honest and to keep telling my stories.
And now I’m going to order those books I promised myself.
* from The White Album 1979
** from Slouching Towards Bethlehem 1968.
Cindy. I think we are soul sisters! I am in Cebu, Philippines, re-reading Year of Magical Thinking. As you probably know, it was published around the time of our She Writes debuts. It resonated then, and now it’s drumming in the deepest chambers of my psyche. So much has changed for me around the topic of loss, as you know and I’m sure you understand, based on your own experiences since then. Thank you for sharing this. Any idea how long the exhibit will be in LA?
Love this post, and these very meaningful quotes from Joan Didion. Thank you for sharing…