Goodbye To All That

For Me, Joan Didion Was, In Fact, All That

Joan Didion died on December 23rd.

I have been in North Carolina with my family, trying to be, as they say, present, so time has passed and Didion’s death was not untimely. That said, what may have been a small headline way down the queue of your Google newsfeed was, for me, a demarcation. My life up to then, with Joan Didion in the world, is now my life, post-Didion. It is an enormous thing for me to process. I have spent the last week, a la Didion, obsessing over what, exactly, I wanted to tell you about her.

What excited me as a reader, what I paid attention to as a writer, what formed in the chaos of my own new learning, I was able to turn into a comet of associations bound to words, thanks to her example. I learned that beneath the surface was where everything interesting was happening. I learned to approach a story directly, but only after first finding my angle. The angle was basically never what was presented. You had to wait for it, and it had to be real.

Writers often adopt an imperative to cut to the chase, make the point, get out while the getting is good, lest you lose your audience. Didion rejected this; obsessively, purposely unsparing, she took readers through the gyre in search of the real story. The payoff for sticking with her was those moments where you really understood the point she was trying to make. Not a slow dawning, but a lightning bolt.

I trusted her voice like no other.

That is why I find myself wanting to hear her account of her death. She would be exact about this most significant, most speculative human experience. She would, as she liked to say, get it right.

The story she insisted on is the story she was genuinely curious about, making it the story that somehow stuck, the story that not only mattered but defined both the moment and its context.

She left behind prodigious and varied field notes, which have served as this writer’s road map. Didion validated the conviction I have felt since age seventeen: “the sense that it’s possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it’s worth doing. That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something.”

To write is a creative impulse; to source and examine that creative impulse, a deepening into a writer’s reason for being. This is what Joan Didion gave me: my identity as a writer convinced that any of this, all of this, matters enough to find the right words.