Joan Didion - Let Me Tell You What I Mean

A peculiar aspect of Joan Didions nonfiction is that a significant portion of it reads like fiction. Or, more specifically, has the metaphorical power of great fiction. While younger generations may read the master as a kind of window into the mythical 1960s, or 9/11, say, its impossible not to see, too, how Didions examination of racial bias and the Central Park Five, Reagan-era El Salvador, or the smug, violent, white male carelessness that characterized the infamous Spur Posse in Lakewood, California, in the early 1990s, anticipated the deeply troubling politics of today. And while the farsighted Didion is certainly in evidence in a few of her early essays collected in this book of twelve previously uncollected piecesessays ranging from a 1968 report on Gamblers Anonymous to an appreciation of Martha Stewart, published thirty-two years laterwhat makes the early work particularly interesting is how Didions now famous cool and shifting perspective takes a backseat to Didion the Opiner. From 1968s Alicia and the Underground Press:

The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Open City, and the East Village Other. I tell you that not to make myself out an amusing eccentric, perverse and eclectic and, well, groovy in all her tastes; I am talking here about something deadening and peculiar, the inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way, the failure of American newspapers to get through.

This piece is exceptional for a number of reasons, the primary one being, aside from its decidedly emphatic, cranky tone and the long-ago days that titles like the East Village Other evoke, is Didion laying out a kind of writerly ethos a little further along in the piece.

She says:

The Free Press, the EVO, the Berkeley Barb, all the other tabloid-sized papers that reflect the special interests of the young and the disaffiliated: their particular virtue is to be devoid of conventional press postures, so many of which rest on a quite factitious objectivity. Do not misread me: I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writers particular bias. For the writer to pretend that he has none lends the entire venture a mendacity that has never infected The Wall Street Journal and does not infect yet the underground press. When a writer for an underground paper approves or disapproves of something, he says so, quite often in lieu of who, what, where, when, how.

Of course, part of the remarkable character of Didions work has to do with her refusal to pretend that she doesnt exist. From the time she began writing for The Saturday EveningPost specificallyshe and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, shared a column called Points West for the magazine from 1964 to 1969through masterly late novels such as 1984s Democracy, Didion has wrestled with the I character, which is to say with truth and perspective as it applied to, or appealed to, herself. That she rejected the notion that the world can be filtered through the precepts of journalism and come out on the other side as true radicalized Joan Didions nonfiction from the first. Her narrative nonfiction is a question about the truth. And if her nonfiction is synonymous with anything, says Didion in work after work, it is with the idea that the truth is provisional, and the only thing backing it up is who you are at the time you wrote this or that, and that your joys and biases and prejudices are part of writing, too. And while a few of these pieces were written around the time Didion published some of her justly famous reporting as wellher landmark collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, came out in 1968it was Didions fiction that taught her, I think, how to articulate what bugged her by tempering it with humor and a dry little sigh of exasperation. In novels like 1970s Play It as It Lays, and her early masterpiece, 1977s A Book of Common Prayer, the intensities of youth were replaced with the rueful forbearance of the experienced woman who could create protagonists and narrators who had seen their share of stuff go down, or not happen, or whatever. Didion the novelist taught Didion the nonfiction writer.