Joan Didion, Writer

Joan Didion was a glamorous woman in her youth, often photographed wearing dark glasses.  Even then, though, she describes herself as painfully shy about making phone calls and her speech is so haltering at times that she wonders if she'd had "a small stroke."  (I wondered that myself as I listened to her being interviewed on the documentary.)

She was married to John Dunne, a writer in his own right, and they adopted a daughter.  She and John were companionable as writers, editing each other's writing and so close that a friend said they "finished each other's sentences."

In the documentary about her life, her discomfort in conversation is obvious, her gestures oversized and awkward.  At times, her face looks almost terrified at the prospect of responding to a question with a sentence. But on the page--she is surefooted.  Her sentences are often marvels of writing.

Last night, I downloaded a couple of her older books. Her persona on the page is never bashful.

Writing like hers doesn't come easy--drafts and drafts and drafts, she tells us, until she's said exactly what she intended to say, and even better: what she never anticipated saying until the writing led her to say it.

I tried to read her books when I was young.  I wasn't smart enough, curious enough, or patient enough to read them. I had such limited knowledge of the world and was not curious about some of her subjects.  She was reporting on a time I was alive but not paying attention--or ready to.

I'm still not interested in some of her subjects and I skim through the essays on, say, Howard Hughes and John Wayne.  But I perk up when she tells real stories (like the one about the woman who was having an affair with a lawyer and murdered her husband in San Bernardino) with the effectiveness of good fiction, or when she reveals something that seems to have just occurred to her in the writing.  

"In some ways it was the conventional clandestine affair in a place like San Bernardino, a place where little is bright or graceful, where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed." 

"The Mormons settled this ominous country, and then they abandoned it, but by the time they left the first orange tree had been planted and for the next hundred years the San Bernardino Valley would draw a kind of people who imagined they might live among the talismanic fruit and prosper in the dry air, people who brought with them their Midwestern ways of building and cooking and praying and who tried to graft those ways upon the land.  The graft took in curious ways.  This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or Jew.  This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book." 

Lesser writers chew on pencils and hover over keyboards waiting for something to come to us, sure that we'll write the book or play or poem when we have time, when the idea lands, when we're not so worried about if or how it will be received.

Didion's persona reflects her being always a writer, always looking, always reporting, always asking questions, always open to discoveries that land while she's writing.