When Joan Didion died on 23rd December 2021, she left behind sixteen books, seven movies and a play and multiple Instagram posts of her standing in front of her corvette, wearing a long white dress with a cigarette dangling from her hand or the infamous “packing list”.
It’s easy to romanticise Didion, with the Celine ad, the huge sunglasses, cigarettes and bourbon and the Doors. And the style is quite fabulous. It is the style of a woman who makes her own choices uninfluenced by others. It conveys a sense of decisiveness. It’s no wonder she has been irresistible to the fashion world. So much so that now she seems a lifestyle icon more than a prolific writer. But here she is Joan Didion, the icon. The Joan Didion, I came to admire was Joan Didion, the writer, whose subject was human delusion, who showed the same decisiveness in her prose as she did in her style. She wrote with an authority still unprecedented and discouraged among female writers. When I read Joan Didion, her prose was one of the first ones that felt was for me.
She did a profile on Joan Baez, who she thought was “an interesting girl” and Georgia O’Keefe, who she admiringly called “a hard woman” who ” seemed to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was”. ” The White Album” starts with the line-“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”. An indictment about “the impositions of a narrative line upon disparate images” turned into Instagram captions about the generous nourishing quality of stories. She understood that the idealism of the counter-culture movement had a dark side to it. She probed into subjects, and in the process canonised, ranging from the marriage industry of Las Vegas, the hippie movement of the 1960s and later on grief with her memoirs, The Year Of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, accounts of losing her husband and then, her daughter, respectively.
Born in a conservative family in Sacramento, in 1934, Didion learned her craft by rewriting Hemingway’s stories on her typewriter. She felt by her own admission, “radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people”, which included feminism. In her 1972 piece called ‘ The Women’s Movement’, she writes:
“To those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration
of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist
analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.”
The fact she was a woman was an important one. She gave her writing supremacy. She was one of the pioneers of New Journalism. As Caitlin Flanagan said in the Atlantic, “Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them.”
It is sometimes disappointing to me that she is quoted more than she is read. The irony in all of it is that the ‘myth of Joan Didion’ is something she herself would have tried to unravel.
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