on Joan Didion
The literary voice of her generation immortalized as a cultural icon, Joan Didion is among the giants of American literature. Known and revered as much for her cultural commentary as for her personal narratives, Didion has shaped the way we define and understand ourselves.
A native Californian, Didion took up writing as a young child, encouraged by her mother. Her early days as a writer were spent at Vogue where she worked under Allene Talmey, an “unsparing editor and boss” in Didion’s own words. Starting as a copywriter, Didion perfected her writing style during this time. Brian Dillon examines this early work, a practice he argues shaped Didion as a writer, the beginnings of the exacting author we know today, her style “usually direct and declarative; it is filled with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions”.
“In a profile we wrote 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.”
We idolize Didion because her California-cooler-than-thou mixed with damned smarts is straight up.
Didion went on to write the essay, “On Self-Respect”, a seminal piece centered around personhood, the first of its kind at Vogue. From this point forward she will take her ability to observe life, analyze current events, and reflect on the human condition to build a career as a writer, political journalist, and screenwriter. Her varied body of work has touched and inspired readers of all backgrounds, and initiated many on their literary journeys.
Joan Didion has been central to So Textual’s inception. If you received Jennie’s first email, you’ll know how an exchange with a friend, specifically referencing Didion’s “On Self- Respect”, inspired this very idea.
“On Self-Respect”, touched me at a point in my life when I’d just had a baby, and felt I had to fight for the time and the mental freedom to write, to read, to be creative. Against this tension I wondered, What’s the point? — In the essay, Didion writes about the feeling of “the end of something, and innocence may be the word for it.” Yes, it warranted that “private reconciliation” perhaps everyone has at some point: who do I want to be in light of who I am becoming? And can I accept responsibility for it - for motherhood and artistry both, the sacrices both warrant? Didion writes, “Anything worth having has its price” and yet, what I glean from the essay is that self-respect is the money tree from which cost is no issue. Didion’s words became a way of understanding my selfhood, and making sense of the things that mattered most. As Didion’s writing helped me get through this challenging time in my life, I came to realize it similarly aided the author, herself.
Didion at The Whisky a Gogo, by Julian Wasser
Joan Didion, Hollywood, 1968 by Julian Wasser
In her later years, Didion would apply her journalistic approach and sharp observational skills to her own life, reporting on personal events in her signature sober and analytical fashion. The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights recount the passing of her husband John Gregory Dunne, and of her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, respectively. These volumes are centered around loss and grief, a direct attempt at processing the past as a means to understand an inexplicable present. Making order in times of disorder as only she was capable of, Didion turns her keen eye inwards, using her personal journey as a tool to illuminate a universal condition.
Didion’s holistic sense of selfhood allowed for matters of appearance to, well, matter.
Beautifully stated by Brandon Taylor, “It was a difficult book to read (Blue Nights) — made more difficult still by the lacerating beauty of its prose — precisely because it refuses to offer advice or aid. I was sad when I finished it, of course, hurting. But there had been such pleasure in the agony of its truth. The book itself is a pact with the idea that there can be no way through something except through it and even then, one emerges as a different person, altered in all the ways we become altered by life.”
Like Taylor, Kate Parfet, a friend of So Textual, is one of the many people who have been deeply touched by this work. In it, she recognized her own pain, therefore ultimately finding healing in the pages.
“When I started reading The Year of Magical Thinking I was exploring what was lost. I took to navigating that amorphous, gravity- less place. In many ways my empty spaces became destinations. There was memory, the sense of loss, the attempt to recapture what couldn’t be and ultimately understanding that being caught between two destinations can be a destination unto itself.
‘People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.’
“Joan helped me realize our need as humans to rationalize when a loved one leaves us unexpectedly. Ultimately ownership, comparison and blame don’t hold any real value. Empathy and compassion do.”
Julian Wasser, Hollywood, 1968
Both the contents of Didion’s books and the style of her writing have played a part in making her so revered. Her reach is unlike other writers of the same caliber. Her ability to capture and chronicle transcend time and place, even when the story is strongly tied to these very coordinates. Her observations on self still echo true to the modern reader. They are tools of self-discovery, concepts and ideas against which we define ourselves. Her voice, honest and factual, affirming in its directness, as to compel the reader to find themselves in its words, narrator or subject alike. A prose so matter-of-fact and arresting we can’t help but engage.
For Didion, personal style and the plainspoken page were at the tip of the same spear.
Didion did a great service to both the literary and fashion worlds. For Didion, personal style and the plainspoken page were at the tip of the same spear. In her way, Joan Didion was a master of monologue. Just as she built a one-way mirror around herself speaking through an unanswerable medium, she dressed in absolutes. Her clothes, while always topics of conversation for others, were never an invitation to chat; Even after her legendary Céline ad, so late in her years, Didion feigned or perhaps was genuinely ignorant to the ruckus she caused, telling the Times, “I don’t have any clue... I genuinely have no idea.”
Of course, fashion and art can hold many roles, even that of a shield. She found that by taking control of adult codes of presentation and power around her, she could take back control of her own narrative.
And so began a lifetime of reflection and self- observation, always the first to pass judgment on herself—a sundress she wears in the essay “Goodbye to All That” may have “seemed smart” in Sacramento, but in New York’s arrivals terminal, its inadequacy piques her obsession with aligning to the right labels, the right establishments to frequent. (Could it have been an inoffensive yet unrefined Staud? Or a defanged Ganni?)
Even before landing crucially at Vogue, Didion’s holistic sense of selfhood allowed for matters of appearance to, well, matter.
Today, the labels she wore (yes, Phoebe’s Céline), their many imitators (The Frankie Shop, perhaps), or those she would have worn (The Row, Gabriela Hearst, Sea New York, Lemaire, Khaite) are just as capable of wearing a less resolute wearer. She may have labored to curate the brands in her orbit, but the designers nor even the actual pieces she wore were responsible for the powerful image we all hang onto of Joan. After all, what is everlasting style but a worldview persisting?
Joan Didion, photographed by Jeurgen Teller for Celine
Joan Didion by Brigitte Lacombe
While it's true, as Zadie Smith has written, that it's easier to look at photos of Didion than to read her, perhaps she's too harsh in her assessment that our personal credos have turned Joan Didion into an exemplar Lite of the social media age. To read is to suspend disbelief—that is its beauty, and also its magic. The magical thinking Didion writes of is a ritualized response to, well, life. Not a "disorder of thought" but rather a condition of it—a human one. Living is "a narrative line upon disparate images." We idolize Didion because her California-cooler-than-thou mixed with damned smarts is straight up. She's archetypal, aspirational because we can imagine ourselves offering something to the world, or at least taking a Didion aphorism and running with it. She speaks to us because she is not of our time; she inspires us because she transcends it. Yes, she's smarter than us. But we're smarter (read: more attentive, more self-assured, more generous) because of her.
Yes, she's smarter than us. But we're smarter (read: more attentive, more self-assured, more generous) because of her.
Consider reading “On Keeping a Notebook”—the crucial point Didion makes (read it to know) is crucial to the knowing of each other, too. That's wisdom.
Written as a collaborative piece between So Textual founder Jennie Edgar, Kate Parfet, Laura Reilly, Ilaria Benzoni-Clark and Dimanche Creative.