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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
At the same time, Didion and her husband lived a life of Establishment privilege and glamour, on a scale not exactly replicable today (since the Establishment in question essentially no longer exists). She and Dunne were paid well to write avowedly serious articles for serious publications, most of which have evaporated or bite-sized themselves. They were paid even better to write scripts for Hollywood movies, which involved the ambiguous bargain of being flown around the world, put up in luxurious hotels, treated like minor celebrities and asked to work long hours on rewrites for films that might not get made or might not turn out to be worth making. They dined repeatedly in the fashionable restaurants of New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London; as Didion observes in "The Year of Magical Thinking," they were the sort of people who dealt with a short-term cash flow crisis by decamping to a Hawaiian resort for several weeks.
We all imagine we could endure such experiences and emerge uncorrupted, our critical faculties intact; at any rate, most of us would be willing to try. On the one hand, it was gratifying on a prurient level to have people who seemed like us living that way; on the other hand it was gratifying to learn from Didion's writing that such a life did not apparently free one from the pandemic anxieties and uncertainties of the age. One of the reasons Didion's work is so influential among her fellow writers is that it catalyzes twin reactions that are linked at an unconscious level: the impulse toward self-flagellation (see also: Miller, Judith) and the impulse toward envy. If our work were smarter, sharper, less superficial, we'd get our earthly reward at Elaine's, Zadie Smith at one elbow and Johnny Depp at the other.
All of this is to say that Didion's fans experience her work on an intimate, personal level as well as an intellectual one. (Because of that, her influence on journalism is much more profound than the macho histrionics of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson.) One of the reasons I'm not quoting from "The Year of Magical Thinking" is because you've probably read enough of it by now, if you're interested; another is that your reading of it belongs to you, and mine to me. I found out about this during that interview two years ago, after the publication of her California memoir, "Where I Was From."
Like many other Californians in New York, I identified, in a gross and general way, with her transcontinental peregrination, and said so in the piece. In person and in her book, Didion reminded me of my mother, and I said that too. A reader sent me a furious e-mail on the day my interview appeared; she thought I was a condescending sexist, seeking to defang a formidable female writer by comparing her to Mommy. I tried to explain that she didn't know my Mommy, who, if not one-tenth as famous as Joan Didion, is nonetheless a writer and roughly the same breed of finishing-school, tough-yet-neurotic and un-defanged California WASP, a breed now rare to the point of extinction. We ended up by extending mutual apologies and forgiving each other for our perceived sins, but I learned two things that should have been clear all along: 1) My profoundly meaningful anecdote had only interfered with this reader's Didion experience (which she apparently preferred to an O'Hehir experience); and 2) The Didion trick, of framing your journalistic encounters with the world in personal terms, isn't as easy as it looks.
During our interview, I followed Didion into the kitchen of that vast 71st Street apartment (a source of awe and envy for any New Yorker) so she could fetch me an Evian water. This might seem unlikely -- Joan Didion, of all people, fetching drinks for random visitors -- but in reading "The Year of Magical Thinking" you develop a clear sense of how closely the persona of Joan Didion, writer, was intertwined with those of John Gregory Dunne's wife and Quintana Roo Dunne's mother. When her husband had his fatal heart attack on the night of Dec. 30, 2003, she had just poured him a second scotch and was fixing their dinner.
Dunne came in the kitchen while we were there and introduced himself. I shook his hand and said something conventional about how I admired his work. I felt a faint tingle of dishonesty and guilt in that moment. Like a lot of Didion's fans I held the view that Dunne was the other writer in the household. I had read a lot of his work for a project of my own, a book about Irish-American writers that never got off the ground. If you had pressed me, I guess I would have said that Dunne had frittered away too much of his considerable talent on insubstantial projects.
All along I understood that that opinion had something specious about it, the superior wisdom of a younger and much less accomplished writer. After reading "The Year of Magical Thinking" I understand more. I understand how crucial Didion and Dunne were in each other's writing lives, how Dunne was her first editor, first critic and primary audience, and how difficult it is for her to write without him. I understand that Dunne in his last months -- when he seemed enveloped in depression and premonitions of his death -- viewed his own career in a harsher light than anyone else ever could. Finally, Didion's self-examining prose has worked its usual magic, and I understand that the person I was judging (as happens so often when we criticize others) was not John Gregory Dunne but myself.
Didion's family tragedy could be seen as a signal event in the baby-boom generation's gradual loss of power (even if, at 70, she is a shade too old to be a boomer herself). If the person appointed to explain a certain slice of American history to itself, to disabuse it of its illusions while honoring its dreams, has seen her world implode and her family destroyed, then an epistemological crack has opened in the world. (Again, you know what I mean by the world.) The 20th century is fading in the rear-view mirror -- Nixon brandishing the Bomb, Che Guevara hopped up on LSD -- and the road ahead is liable to end suddenly and send us flying out into the abyss, like Wile E. Coyote, at any moment.
All true. But given lemons, Didion has made lemonade. As I said earlier, "The Year of Magical Thinking" is more than a painful memoir; it's a moving and ambitious work, novelistic in sweep and character, that happens to be nonfictional. In it, Didion accomplishes something she has only gestured at in previous books: She mimics the digressive, self-narrating workings of the mind, in this case a mind disordered by grief. Her subject, you could say, has always been story, the narratives we construct to make our lives possible or tolerable or meaningful. This is the first sentence of her most famous essay: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
