Joan Didion makes me want to write.I'm on a vacation/staycation, sweating in a humid apartment with two fans running, one in front, one behind me. I finished The White Album a week ago, reading The Year of Magical Thinking now and looking forward to her 56-page essay-book, Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11. I only heard of her a month ago in June after finishing Patti Smith's Just Kids. I wanted more writing like that; non-fiction, in-depth explorations of life through an autobiographical lens.
For a sci-fi/fantasy reader, it's been a wayward and rewarding pleasure. If psychobabble holds any truth, I went from "escaping the real-world" to jumping in it full-fledged.
"Most of us live less theatrically, but remain survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending."There's a distant apathy to her style. I picture her flippantly flicking her hand as words go from brain synapses firing onto the page. She's good, she knows it, and it bothers her. She achingly tries to elucidate this feeling in her writing. "A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work", as an anonymous Wikipedia contributor references from an article about her.
"I gravitated to the random. I swung with the non-sequential."She's more funny than serious though. More lost than analytical. She comes from wealth, is wealthy, and has a clear understanding that her station in life - as a renowned journalist and author - allows her (comped) access to varied aspects of life that others don't see. Her candor gives you front-row seats.
"Bike movies are made for all these children of vague "hill" stock who grow up absurd in the West and Southwest, children whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made. These children are, increasingly, everywhere, and their style is that of an entire generation."She's talking about the generation of the 70's, but I see the hipsters of today or sometimes the disconnected teen entrepreneurs or the laid-off brokers turned freelancers. Held accountable to rules that no longer pertain to them. Absurd, begrudging, distant.
I keep reading Didion because she keeps hinting at recurring themes. Having written since the early 60's till today, she could very well point out the "human search for meaning in a changing world". But it's something Obama might say in a campaign speech. We might see it on a billboard promoting Scientology, abortion rights, or Chase Bank. It may be assigned as a homework assignment in an English class focused on the classics; Of Mice and Men, Dickens, or Brave New World. The cliche doesn't bear repeating, so she writes to convey the feeling.