Appreciating Joan Didion

   I have been reading Joan Didion for several weeks now in little dribs and drabs.  There is something very powerful and condensed about her writing.  Some of this is the careful precise and specific way she uses words.   But that is not the most important element.   She has the ability to convey her presence in the setting she is writing about,  without complex self reflective clauses.   She has “beginner’s mind”, the immediate awareness of what she is experiencing,  and then the ability to put that experience into words.  Whether she is describing the chaos of Haight Ashbury,  or her return to the changes of her home town Sacramento,  she can present the immediate details that convey her experience with a felt intensity.  She collages stories,  images,  poetry fragments,  and factual details into a solid impressive aggregate form,  yet each retains it identity as a separate element.  I don't know if I would feel that in her screenplays,  but “PLAY IT AS IT LAYS” has a remarkable sense of presence for the lead character who is so totally despairing that I struggle to stay connected with her.   “Do you want to know about the people of Los Angeles film community?”, she asks.  “I’ll tell you about one.  This is what she is like.  Is that what you want?”  
    No, of course it is not what we want.  We want to know about the deliciously devious stories of the shallow loves and worries of the famous “stars”.  We want to know the inside gossip of who is in love with whom,  and who is about to have whose baby.  We want the soap opera version of the people living here,  and instead she gives us the broken glass shards of a damaged human life.  It is a dirty trick.  Yes, we know there are such people living out here.  The people who have not quite made it,  who try,  and then their lives fall apart.  We don’t want to hear about one of them,  they are not important.  "Why did you pick her instead of someone more interesting?"  Perhaps it is her perversity about human beings,  her interest in their failings and duplicity.  But I don’t think she is a misanthrope.  Her “beginner’s mind” sees life as it is, not distracted by the web of illusion we spin around ourselves.   As readers we all admire her ability,  but as people we resent her destroying the stories “we tell ourselves in order to live”.  
    She was a certain sort of “new journalist”, present without intruding into the story.  She began with the 60s,  then the 70s-80s,  and then took on the dangers of El Salvador,  and the contradictions of Miami.  And finally she addressed the contradictions of her birth state, California.  Perhaps she is at her best reflecting on the state and places in which she grew up and lived for a time.  Her reflections on Sacramento reveal the evolving changes in the largest state and its peculiar history.  Does California reflect the future of the whole country?  If it does then the changes she describes are part of the process occurring everywhere.
    She is not dismissive of the people she is deflating.  She does not make herself an important part of the story even when she is telling her own story.   There is an innate human reserve, a humility, about her voice which carries over to the people she observes.  When they lose that humility and succumb to their illusions,  she observes the ironic consequences that often ensue and does not berate them.  In Dylan’s words “She knows too much to argue or to judge.”