Some number of years ago, I became preoccupied with googling “Patti Smith” and “Joan Didion” every couple of months, usually at the same time though not always, in order to make sure that both of them were still alive. And while I understand theoretically that all the women I adore will eventually not remain, the fear of either of these particular women passing away felt especially tangible (hence the compulsion) in addition to being, I’m sure, symbolic. I’m not interested in analyzing the symbolic parts at this time. It’s a curious pairing of qualities, the one being very physical and the other being very much not, but some number of years ago they began arriving as a strong blustery feeling inside me, leading me to assume that I’d discover the news, when the day came that there was any, within the safe tunnel of my own private research.
Wikipedia’s distinction of “is” instead of “was” on the righthand side of my screen was all I looked for, an immediate balm. Then I’d continue with my day.
Text message received from M at 1:56 pm on 12/23/2021:
“Oh fuck. Joan Didion died.”
I was still a social worker, and had just arrived at a client’s home, an elderly woman from Berkeley who would talk to me about Robert Sapolsky’s research on depression, and making her own fondue, and dancing with MC Hammer in the 80’s, and who didn’t believe she was schizophrenic—I include this last part as an addition, not a counter. She’d asked me to help her deliver some christmas packages to the home of her adult son, who wasn’t speaking to her at the time.
So I gathered her and the amazon prime boxes and the grief in my stomach (an immediate clenching) and we took all four packages to a muted blue porch close to the center of town, decorated with plump string lights and an old plastic light-up snowman so that the whole scene, a well-behaved Shih Tzu greeting us kindly, looked like a staged magazine cover. We said goodbye to the dog and I took her home quickly. Joan Didion had passed away.
“It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.”
-from “On Self-Respect”
I’d started thinking really feverishly about Slouching Towards Bethlehem the day before, partly because I do this with some regularity but mostly because I’d been asked to contribute to a local digital newspaper, and it took me all of 3.5 seconds to envision myself a journalist poet in a long line of journalist poets—softer, perhaps, than Didion’s calloused bravery, but of a similar lineage—who would, in the style of Frank O’Hara or John Ashbery, bridge the small gap between poems and paintings by telling news-ish stories in lyrical ways about local artists; someone who would hold in my hands at the same time a thing that matters a lot to me and a way of saying it so that it might matter a lot to others, too.
And when I say that word, calloused, I don’t mean how you accuse someone of being cold-hearted. All you have to read is Joan Didion’s short essay, “On Self-Respect,” famously written to an exact word count for Vogue, to recognize that at the base of her steadfast attention is a foundation of care. Unflinchingness, however abrasive it can be, just means attention that refuses to stop paying attention, and I think this has to be a kind of love, warm and endless like the desert, which runs throughout Didion’s writing regardless of its bite, or its suspicions, or its brutal political content, or its guarded tone. You can pierce, suspect others, take stances and keep your boundaries firm while still caring about the world that exists on the other side of your magnifying glass.
When I say that word, calloused, I mean worn from repeated practice, from an effort that does not bow before time’s fleetingness or the ego’s tendency to blush. Joan Didion’s writing feels a lot to me like the fingertips of an admittedly small pair of hands, worn yet deft from plucking music from the world with the furious intention of making each note sound at least a tiny bit clearer than the last. I mean calloused precisely as a result of her sensitivity, not a testament to its absence. If you are sensitive and not calloused, it means you’ve stayed home and stopped trying, which was simply not the case for Joan Didion or her words.
Of course, the funny thing about paying close attention to the world is how often it just means paying close attention to the self, your self, moving through it, not because your personal value is greater than the value of others but because, in the “strong objectivity” sense of things as much as the existential sense of things, we can only understand what we love and what we dislike through our own experiences of the loved and the disliked. And while our experiences don’t account for all experiences, they are still, in their own way, endless.
So when I say the world existed on the other side of her magnifying glass, I also mean she existed there, that the world was being examined through the filter of her own history within it, often in the form of reflecting on the younger self. I might quote here the full text of “On Keeping a Notebook,” written in 1966, to illustrate the tender scrutiny with which she wrote about being young, at once confessional and radically accepting. Indeed, its this precise capacity for lying down in the “notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves,” and mustering the self-respect that allows us to now and again find some rest there, that acts as a driving thesis of so much of her work.
Accepting the self is confessing to and on behalf of the self. It is reflecting, for example, on the time she was quite ill, a new transplant in New York City, and how it hadn’t occurred to her
to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.
-from “Goodbye to All That”
Embarrassment and confession and a curiosity that does not smooth the sharp edges: all of it is there, sprung from the body a long time ago and still relevant, still a source of learning and humility.
I spent the last few years feeling really scared of Joan Didion’s eventual death. In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem and regarding her completion of the essay of the same name, Didion wrote about her own fear, though her sentences have that way of not betraying the emotion itself, of carrying along the idea of fear as if it’s always at least 50% intellectual—isn’t it?—a fear of something I might call entropy: “It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart.” A tangible, and also symbolic, fear.
It is the same fear, intellectualized and kept at arms length, that Maria Wyeth voices in the 1970 novel, Play It as It Lays: “Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.” Paired with the introspective line, “It occurred to Maria that whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women,” I read this handful of words as a blunt summary of the gendered life.
Perhaps I worked very hard at not thinking about how Joan Didion would someday go by spending an inordinate amount of time double checking that she hadn’t, in that same way we sometimes beckon the very substances we turn our noses up at, or fall apart more promptly for all our clumsy efforts not to, or resist certain conclusions that, in the end, might afford us the most relief. Is it relief that we’re after, most of all? In taking the packages to her son’s porch, my client had wanted, more than anything, to not have to see them on christmas day.
“I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked door. The fear is for what is still to be lost.”
-from Blue Nights
Well, as Didion would write, goodbye to all that: the focused anticipation of loss, the clinging to a segment of a life cycle rather than the whole thing. I’m done taking things out of context just so I can love or fear them. In addition to the days brimming with opinion and adoration and discourse, and the preference that none of it end, I’d like some afternoons filled entirely with nonchalance and humility, where I can be a calm boat in a lazy river—no fretting over what direction I’m headed, no tussling about in the water just to define my edges against it. In short, the ability “to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.”
It’s Joan Didion’s disentangling of our most romantic versions of things, places like New York City and Northern California, and the golden age of living when life was all promises, that makes me swoon; how she collapses the distinction between this moment, here, and real life, over there, the one supposedly on its way. It makes me feel sad for this moment and it makes me feel sad for real life, and somehow by feeling the same thing for both I come away slightly more integrated, which I don’t feel sad about at all. There’s something that tends my soul, something so nearly ideal, about the precision with which she takes apart idealizations, most prominently those of the self.
I’m being kind of silly here in my adoration, and my exaggerated literary grief, and my pretending to do something that isn’t just naive mimicking and mirroring of everything Didion was & wasn’t, as if it isn’t secretly the 22-year-old version of me writing this, a girl’s attempt to romance her sentences enough to bring herself closer, à la Cathy Linton, to the very grief she claimed to fear. And as if, by letting such intimacy show up in the writing, I might escape the real work of giving it much attention anywhere else.
Lucy Feldman: “Do you ever reread your past writing? If so, what do you think?”
Joan Didion: “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think something is well done, sometimes I think, Whoops.”
-Interview from January 22, 2021, via TIME
It’s not that Joan Didion was or was not romantic; it’s that she painted a picture of the sometimes’ and the somedays that shape our lives, full of dreaming but also disappointment. It’s that she wrote about the entirely paved roads that escort us to the promises, and the dusty, narrow lanes that lead us quietly out of them.
From “On Keeping a Notebook”:
I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $1,000 a month. “Someday you will,” [an anonymous woman transcribed in Didion’s notebook] said lazily. “Someday it all comes.” There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorcing her husband. “He left me no choice,” she said over and over and over as she punched the register. “He has a little seven-month-old baby by her, he left me no choice.” I would like to believe that my dread then was for the human condition, but of course it was for me, because I wanted a baby and did not then have one and because I wanted to own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover.
Someday, maybe even soon, my heart will be calloused enough to remain smart and vulnerable and witty as I hold, inevitably, more grief. (I suppose that was the symbolic part of my fear all along: the always more-ness of grief, its lack of maximum capacity, and my foolish attempt to assign it a boundary—when this line is crossed, I will really be done in—as if more doings and undoings wouldn’t follow. There is no last straw of loss.)
Sometimes the somedays lead us into the sun, but more somedays keep coming, sometimes even during the night. This is the trick of Joan Didion’s hypnotizing charm coupled with discerning cultural observation: the relief that only follows tension, the mistakes that must anticipate accomplishments, the whoops’s and the well dones and the done ins. The necessity of saying goodbye and hello, and hello and goodbye, to all of it.
Sarah, I discovered this essay unread in my inbox two and a half years late but actually, at just the right time. There's so much that's speaking to me in it, I hardly know what to highlight. But thanks for this one. I'm laughing, too, because we never know when or how our words may reach someone. :)
Thank you for writing! Interesting that the photographs of Joan didn't appear until I pressed "Comment." It is abundantly clear that the author of the Joan Didion tribute wrote with calloused hands. Ms. Didion is, was, will be close by your side, touching the brilliance of your fingertips forever.