Pearls from Didion, maybe a writer can be known, it just takes another writer.
I don't think too many people lie awake at night thinking about this stuff. If they did, nothing would get done.
1
Carl,
Thank you. I agree completely. And you are my favorite NYT columnist.
RB
2
JD's essay on self-respect had a profound impact on me as a teenager; I live my life the way I do in part because of it. One passage has stuck with me: "People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you're married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds." Those words have saved the world from a lot of whining on my part over the years.
19
Many thanks to Frank Bruni for this op-ed. It is a pleasure to share my respect and admiration for Joan Didion. When I was transplanted from NYC to the SF Bay Area in the 1980s and going through major culture shock I discovered her essays and they were a comfort. Have read about everything she has written. I thought she was from the East Coast given her sensibility but found out she had grown up in the Sacramento Valley. She got her sense from her pioneer ancestors. What a distinctive voice she has and you want to know what she thinks and has to say. What a gift to all of us.
6
Bruni begins by presenting an eloquent sentence that asserts “innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.” What I get out of this is: you become guilty when something makes you realize you don’t like yourself. This is almost nonsensical. If I suddenly realize I don’t like myself, why should this make me guilty? Is it a crime not to like yourself? Bruni understands the assertion as: with loss of self-esteem, you become an adult. This makes somewhat more sense, but it isn’t true. You become an adult when you begin to take responsibility for your actions whether you like yourself or not.
After failing to fathom these imponderables, I watched a video of Rita Moreno singing Fever with Animal of the Moppets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoIZQh1IjI8. It was hilarious, but it left me with a final question: Do you think Rita Moreno has ever been stripped of liking herself and thereby having lost her innocence (whatever that means)?
3
I did not like Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking". As a mother who has lost a child, I found her representation of what grief looks like to be shallow and insensitive.
2
And who can forget the mohair throw.....
1
Didion, I think, gets the structure of that sentence from the first sentence of George Orwell's "On Shooting An Elephant," which I am sure she knew well:
"In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me"
Dry music, with the sound of a snake rustling in the leaves. Joan Didion is a writer's writer. And--as Janet Malcolm, another writer's writer has pointed out: writers are mercenaries. That Didion isn't like other people is one of the talents--let's say--that makes her a writer, not a social worker or a Florence Nightingale or even a particularly good mother.
Pace.
15
I also <3 sentences and especially attention-getting openers.
Every sentence written by John Steinbeck…
“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.” (Opening line of The Grapes of Wrath)
Some of my favorite sentences/openers from NYT columnist/reporters.
Dan Barry, About New York: “Cats and Rats and the Rats are Losing”
A broken bottle of a man sat on the hot sidewalk Thursday afternoon, lips wet from the beer he had just tossed under a car.
Dennis Overbye, “Gamma Rays May Be Clue on Dark Matter”
The finding may be the latest in a long string of false alarms, they said, or it might be that the mysterious dark matter that permeates the universe is finally showing a bit of leg.” (In a horrible PC move, Times editors changed the last part of this sentence to “finally showing its face,” but I have the paper copy of the original, and a photo of that opener.)
Susan Dominus, “The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook”
Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.
10
Nora Ephron in one of her essays remembered her mother, who was also a writer, remarking of some difficult experience "Remember: it's all material." She meant that the professional writer must look at any painful experience in two separate ways; both as personal tragedy, and as potential writer's gold. Didion has used the painful material in her own life in the same way, and the result has been masterpieces like "The Year of Magical Thinking."
Didion knows as well as we do that by reporting her calculating reaction to a five-year old on LSD she is opening herself to a charge of moral obtuseness. How much easier would it be to report her reaction as one of horror and indignation. But by being willing to expose the workings of the professional writer's mind she not only told the truth, but she captured a truth that is usually hidden from naive and sentimental readers - that to write well requires, at times, a cold eye. The subject of the documentary film being Didion's own methods as a writer, she now tells the shocking truth, at her own expense, just as she earlier relied on her reader to supply indignation at the reported scene. Her comment is perfect, Didion-style, truth-telling, without trying to appear like the warm-hearted humanitarian that "marathon06" wishes her to be.
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And that "genius for sentences" is the product of her extraordinary capacities for observing the most microscopic elements and movements of the human psyche and unmatched ability to examine these coolly, from the necessary distance. She is a national treasure.
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And my personal favorite - “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
7
Well then...I haven't used those brain lobes for about sixty years. Many thanks!
5
Thanks for this fine column, which takes me back decades to my first exposure to Joan Didion, which left me struggling to get my brain around her prose and my (at that time) cluelessness about self-analysis. I have returned to her words ever since, new and old, to help me sort out myself and the world. "The Year Of Magical Thinking" is a primer for all approaching or living in old age. The picture of aging and loss isn't pretty, but forewarned is forearmed. Her courage in not only facing, but writing about, the ultimate losses in her life girds me for mine.
12
The film is immensely valuable since it shares Didion with those who might not know her writing well. She embodies a skill, toughness and devotion to craft that stands for the pinnacle of professionalism and intellectual maturity. Whether one always agreed with her or not, she told truth to power; her self-respect would not permit anything else. The close of the documentary sums up her object: plumbing the mystery of "what it is like to be me." This is an American writer who is part of a great, if underappreciated tradition.
3
Thanks for this piece. Didion has a genius for sentences, I agree, but more important is her complete commitment to our communal human struggle toward the truth. I thought Griffin Dunne's documentary made clear her determination not to spare herself or others in that struggle. We need more writers with this sort of commitment.
9
"The Year of Magical Thinking" is probably the best memoir I've read. It isn't possible to describe the power, sadness, and the tenderness, that at times comes across, if it's possible, as unsentimental reportage.
Joan Didion also strikes me as unbelievably selfish, as did her husband. What really kicked me in the teeth was her description of a five year old child who had been drugged with LSD. She said, "It was gold," and "You live for moments like that." It takes a deep perversion to exploit an abused child for material for a story.
So, yes, Joan Didion is great, but she is also disturbing, and not in a good way.
35
The comment is disturbing, you're right. But every single journalist--at least those who cover such stories--gave a silent nod to this comment. It's sad but true, when you're writing a story, you use everything you get. I know; I've been there.
7
See my comment, above. To be a writer is to be, as Henry James put it, a "publishing scoundrel." Her honesty that you so rightly adore in "The Year of Magical Thinking" is also audible in Didion's revelation that meeting a five-year-old on LSD was "gold." That's how good writers react, and how masterpieces get written. Didion knew from her first published piece in Vogue that she was not innocent - and she claims that the rest of us aren't either. The difference is, we hide that fact, even from ourselves, while she bravely writes and speaks about it.
10
My love affair with Joan Didion's writing began when a professor in a freshman composition course assigned essays from "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Thirty years later, I've read just about everything she's written, and subscribed to NYRB when she was doing some exceptional political writing (Clinton Agonistes comes to mind). I downsized my apartment last year and the only hardback books I kept were those written by Joan Didion. As others have noted, "The White Album" is exceptional.
5
Thank you.
3
NYT is rich in editorial columnists. Bruni sits atop that bounty.
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Why would anybody like her writing? So much meaning. So many words. And the nuance and complexity! Too contemplative. Anyway, who wants lunch?
5
'The door that someone opened
The door that someone closed
The chair where someone sat
The cat that someone pat
The fruit that someone bit
The letter that someone read
The chair that someone knocked over
The door that someone opened
The road where someone is still running
The forest that someone crosses
The river into which someone leapt
The hospital where someone died'.
Jacques Prevert has a way with words and gives the reader a brief message. Silence. The beauty of silence on a November day where the late sun tenderly embraces an autumn tree.
A drumstick for lunch would be better than fine.
I share your love for sentences, Frank.
When selecting a new book to read, always a challenge - so many books and so little time - I often use the first sentence as a guidepost.
That sentence can either excite me or leave me cold, stir my imagination or do nothing, draw me in or push me away.
“Some real things have happened lately.”
—Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.”
—Dennis Lehane, “Until Gwen”
“A screaming comes across the sky.”
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
I think that's why I have never begun the book I always promised myself I would write - the terror of that first sentence.
7
Terrible column. As others have commented highlighting the “gold”of finding a 5 year old on LSD is quite off putting to me and makes me skeptic of both Joan Didion and Frank Bruni.
Separately I preferred John Gregory Dunn’s writings.
1
That bothered me as well as does her moralizing religiosity. Great writer with some fundamentally flawed views.
1
there is nothing better than reading something written well that says something
2
Her writing grabs hold of you and doesn't let go.
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“A genius for sentences” I do concur. Sometimes just two or three words within it that punch right to the gut of her meaning.
7
Loved the documentary and have always liked Didion, even though she's always been too self-referential (reverential?) for me. Her opening essay in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" about a 1965 murder in San Bernardino CA tells readers more about Southern California at that time than most anything else they can read. Hot, dry, and filled with unhappy marriages with cheating spouses.
3
Sorry. This gushing is so eye-rolling to me. As a writer and journalist myself, I find her and her work cold, depressing, detached, dour, weird, humorless. Hers is an ersatz Californian pose of affectation; her prose is one of those things you’re *supposed* to like, as if having certain books in your house means you’re extra-groovy and in-the-know. Her manner and physical appearance shocked me on the Netflix documentary. Why Frank didn’t mention or question her probable life-long anorexia is just as strange and scary to me as her “It was gold” comment about the baby on heroin.
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Praised heaped on someone who seeing a 5 year old on LSD says 'It was gold. You live for moments like that." instead of "Call an ambulance! Find the mother! Help them! Help me, my heart is bleeding." may not deserve all this praise. Her deep need to be heard about her experiences might better be shared with her mother, who told her how great she was, or with a therapist.
6
Well, it may be more clear if you read a book by Janet Malcolm, "The Journalist and the Murderer," which early-on defines the relationship of journalists to their subjects.
4
My love for reading began in 1970 after reading “Play It as It Lays.” She is brilliant and has the ability to sift human emotion in her writing
1
Whatever her fine words and well meaning sentiments I can't help but think she is of a generation, as I am, that somehow or another despite what started out as the best of intentions gave us these worst of times.
I call them the worst of times not because, by any ordinary measure, they are actually worse then other times, but because of how much better they could have been and should have been; because where once there seemed a rising light of hope there now seems only the rising darkness of hate.
36
I too have read Joan Didion for years, since college in the late 70s. When I arrived in California from western New York State, before I understood “somewhere in the upper 80s” referred to Upper Eastside streets and not temperatures, I applied for a steward position on American Airlines. At my oral interview, there were several candidates in the room and each was asked “If you were flying first class on a coast to coast flight, what famous person would you most like to have on board and why?” One job candidate chose “Nancy Reagan” who at the time was a big deal in California and becoming an even bigger one nationally. Smiles all around the room. Up next, my choice was Joan Didion because really who wouldn’t want to engage in a coast to coast conversation with such a deep thinker and brilliant wordsmith? The members of the hiring panel looked blankly at me and asked “Who’s Joan Didion?” I didn’t get the job.
12
"Dunne asks her how she felt when, in the course of reporting an article about the San Francisco counterculture, she came across a 5-year-old on L.S.D. “It was gold,” she tells him. “You live for moments like that.” i was going to watch the biopic until i read this. Her reaction is utterly despicable. i don't need, or want, to know anything more about Didion.
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And then there's this stellar sentence, long a favorite:
"Havana vanities come to dust in Miami."
It's the first sentence of Didion's MIAMI.
4
This was the year, my seventieth, when I was discovering that I had forgotten the things I thought I never would, when someone turned up unannounced reminding me of my nodding acquaintance with the person I used to be, of the places I don't walk away from and of the perfect sentences that seem a long time ago.
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With respect, it's not so much the sentences, hers or yours, as the gold that they contain. And that gold is not the result of correct grammatical organization so much as shed blood.
2
This evening I woke up thinking of Blanche Dubois. For some reason, it is the only role that I seem able to play and I could not remember the title of Tennessee Williams Play. Come on now, let us not panic, it all happened because of 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter', and 'Desire under the Elms'. The photo taken earlier entitled 'A Cat on a Hot-Tin Roof', which reminded this reader with a memory block that it is a dark and stormy night.
Check the New York Times and a la bonheur, some sensibility seems to be returning to America and the People are waking up. Read what Frank Bruni has to say about the Magic and Moral of Joan Didion, an important recommendation, bringing back in his essay a memory of an adolescent friend, describing his first trip on L.S.D. on a pleasant afternoon in Paris. It ended in Matricide in the end.
Homage to our Authors, and to All, 'we have so many memories. I wish I had more to tell you, but my life is like the purring of a cat. If I were to describe it, it would put you to sleep. I may have more to tell you tomorrow. In the meantime, I send you God's favor' from A State of Affairs by Mavis Gallant.
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As I began to read this column I liked it because it was not about Donald Trump or the Republicans – that alone made it a breath of fresh air. But by the time I finished it, I sadly realized that it could be seen as a vivid counterpoint to the Trumpian zeitgeist. We have a president, and his minions, who emphasizes pose over prose, and who wouldn’t understand the meaning of syntax no matter how many times you explained it to him. In many ways Bruni’s column is painfully nostalgic, harkening back to a time when words and the way we wove them together mattered. The current political climate on the right is anti-intellectual, which apparently means anti anyone who can piece together a grammatically correct sentence, and who can clearly and logically organize and communicate ideas. Actually “anti-intellectual” is too mild a term. The right downright disdains clear thinking (let alone eloquent prose) and uses the jagged language of the street as a weapon.
But it’s not only politics that is diminishing effective writing and eloquence. Technology is also eroding the music of sentences with its obsession to compress and sample, to abbreviate and miniaturize, to reduce concepts to 0s and 1s. Algorithms do our thinking for us. Spell and grammar checks correct our sentences for us, saving us from having to roll up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty when we reach deep into the oily components of a language’s engine.
Ah yes; I remember Joan Didion. I remember writing.
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This was the year, my seventieth, when I was discovering I forget that I had forgotten, when someone turned up unannounced to remind me of the person I used to be, of the places I don't walk away from and of perfect sentences that don't seem such a long time ago.
2
Didion - A Proust of her time who more than captured its zeitgeist.
3
By the age of 22 I thought I had read all the great writers in English, past and present. I was wrong. I hadn't read Joan DIdion until that year. She is incomparable. Nobody comes close.
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JOAN DIDION Has a magical ability to engage the reader in her world in a single sentence. I didn't know that before I read Frank's column today. Yes, I recognized her name, but had never read anything of hers (so far as I can recall). The immediacy of her writing is more poetry than prose. Though I'm sure would argue that it's just the reverse. Her way of describing the numbing and desolation of riding in an ambulance with a loved one whose life hangs in the balance reflects her great love for her husband, in a quiet, hushed tone. To quote eecummings in somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond,
"your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose"
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In the arresting photo above Frank's piece, she appears as if looking to make sure no one notices her. Several onlookers seem to know she's of some consequence. In this moment at age 33, she has already made her mark at Vogue and publshed her first novel. It isn't only hindsight that gives away some of what's ahead.
2
When you said the documentary on Didion was "available on Netflix," you frustrated a lot of fans. It is not available on Netflix, and they don't know when it will be.
I just watched it two nights ago on Netflix. I've been reading her work for years and truly appreciate her "detached" voice ~ the truth telling of her observations both internal and external. I hope you get to see it. So wonderful to hear her read and talk about her life.
2
It is available for streaming on Netflix
1
of course it is
My admiration for Didion is immense. As an early fan of books and literature, her essays blew my world apart. Up until then, I had always thought good writing, whatever that is, had to be flowery, with long sentences and baroque rhythms and sounds. She revealed a voice and a writing style alien to me. Her sentences cut through all that like a knife and I have never been the same. As much as I still love writers of "beautiful' sentences, I have always said that if I could be a writer, I would want to write like Didion.
3
The rapier, Didion, cut through the mass of stuff that clogged my mind. Her books, her thoughts and her sentences woke me up. The harsh, the mean, the keen seer boils it down, getting to the point as no one had. I am grateful to Bruni for illuminating Didion here. She brings singular clarity to the fore.
3
There's nothing like an artist who can paint a picture with words. Every generation needs a voice who can put into words what so many are experiencing.
1
I've read "The Year of Magical Thinking" three times, and I doubt that I will ever get tired of returning to it. The sentences are spare and evocative, and the story is a guide for anyone who has lost the love of their life. I recommend it to my theology students at the beginning of every semester.
2
My favorite writer ever. Her every sentence speaks volumes. A national treasure.
4
Enough with the Didion hagiography.
When my spouse died suddenly five years ago, I foolishly turned to "The Year of Magical Thinking" for some insights. What I found was a story bearing no relationship to any reality I knew as a newly bereaved spouse.
Ms. Didion spent that year in her fancy apartment being coddled by this person and that person. Never once did she talk about the horrifically daunting, quotidian tasks that those of us who have lost spouses must often face. For me, these tasks came in a daily rush, as if from a fire hose: slogging through the details pertaining to the purchase of a burial plot; being told that my spouse's body, which had to be shipped across state lines, might not be there in time for the funeral -- and what did I want to do about that?; having to re-do all of the paperwork from the cemetery because the funeral director had unknowingly let his license expire; having to make 50 phone calls in order to obtain the death certificate; having to find a new estate lawyer after the first one was revealed to be incompetent and a cheat. My list could go on and on and on -- as it did for the better part of two years.
Unlike Ms. Didion, I didn't have a phalanx of people to take care of all the nasty little (and not so little) details that death sends a survivor's way. Unlike Ms. Didion, I had barely an hour or two, here and there, just to grieve. I searched through her book for some semblance of a survivor's reality, but found none.
8
what i try to remember is everyone suffers... some for reasons different from my own. losing a spouse of adulthood is incomprehensible grief but my grief is no more valuable than that of anyone else.
1
I read that book for the same reason you did, and your reaction mirrored mine.
2
I've tried and tried to "like" Joan Didion's writing and have dutifully read her work, but always found it, while beautifully written, a tad pretentious and purposefully negative. Too self-obsessed and Sylvia-Plath-like.
I see, from these comments, that I am alone in these views, and will try again, but expect to remain impressed by the writing but not a fan of the message...if the paragraph about Warren Beatty and perfection in the dangle of Didion's cigarette was intended to alter my impression, it really reinforced it.
3
Well said.
2
Didion?
Don't know anything about her. But I guess she makes mistakes like all of us. I was uncomfortable reading: "Dunne asks her how she felt when, in the course of reporting an article about the San Francisco counterculture, she came across a 5-year-old on L.S.D. “It was gold,” she tells him. “You live for moments like that.”
I hope she meant by gold and living for moments like that that she was thinking more along lines of an interesting story to report rather than it being good a child was on LSD. My experience with LSD is that it is recommended only in the sense of a supercharge, a nitrous burst like driving an engine to the next level, and not to be used if unnecessary.
In other words, take this hypothetical case of a human life: A child is born and all through childhood is going through rapid and natural acceleration of brain development. You probably just want this brain to run natural, proper nutrition, mental stimulation, physical exercise, play. It's only when you start hitting late teens and early twenties not to mention later years that you start hitting profound psychological struggles, paradigm locks which might need the burst of psychedelics to achieve cathartic and integrative breakthrough.
If the brain is running pretty good you don't want to mess with it too much, just let it naturally aspirate. LSD allowed me to achieve a breakthrough at twenty, helped paradigm rearrangement of my life, but I now like breathing natural and holding road.
1
A befitting tribute to a magical writer of amazing grace from another highly polished sculptor of mesmerizing sentences. Thank you Mr. Bruni, for making reading a pleasure.
1
The sentences - yes!
I reread Didion every couple of years or so, and the pleasure never subsides.
I remember the first time I read The White Album being nebulously afraid for her - viscerally responding to "her cultivated image as a nervous waif at the mercy of moods and the Santa Ana wind..."
Jeeze - time to reread some Didion!
2
Thanks, Frank, for this fine appreciation. Although the documentary was okay, as always, Didion was riveting. Your column is a real shot in the arm. Our culture has become pretty coarse in recent years, so I found it comforting that somewhere I could read something about a person of “letters.” The lions of literature I grew up with are fading away, becoming “shades” as Joyce put it. so glad Ms. Didion is still here.
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Yep, when I was an aspiring journalist in the late 70's and early 80's, Slouching Towards Bethlehem was a primary inspiration. Then, years later, my path crossed with Didion again, after my 49 year old wife died from a rare, debilitating disease. The Year of Magical Thinking was one of the books I packed with me on a trip to France with my kids, not long after their mother died. The trip was a way to get out of town, escape the recent past of sickness and fear, to distract us from grief. And as I sat beside a pool at our hotel in southern France, and finished the last paragraphs of Didion's stunningly beautiful memoir, I came full circle in my relationship to the writer, inspired by her at the start of my adult life, and reassured by her in middle age that we are not alone in our grief.
1
I am the rare writer who is not in love with Didion. She's a good writer, yes, but I hardly think she's the goddess everyone in my field (Non-fiction) seems to think she is. And I say this as a feminist, and someone who wishes to promote more female writers.
And, Frank, "All those prepositional phrases near the start"? Really? I counted one near the start.
5
Don’t agree with you on Joan but I was wondering about his math there.
Well, Frank, I have to say you have a mastery for writing sentences, sentences with beauty and rhythm and melody that carry their own weight and more. Not by chance were you blessed with the example such as Ms. Didion provides to you and so many others, but also that you find the richness overflowing from yourself to us and you freely share what you have held onto through these years.
The Magic and the Moral encompasses a way of saying strength that nourishes writers, those in the jouralistic community, in the theory and technique of composition and form, and those unashamedly explaining the philosophy and philosophy of science that are the life blood of those we treasure.
When I was young I confess I was a fiction reader although quite a lot of fiction was in fact our introduction to what would be creative nonfiction a lifetime later. In so many ways the realization that what was history was in many ways a story we had no way of knowing otherwise. As the folk musicians sometimes phrase it, "Let's put everything we have into the first take. There's many a time something's lost in the corrections." Did I say, Thanks? Thanks.
18
Terrific column
6
My favorite NYT Op writer expressing his admiration for one of my favorite American writers!
16
I read Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne's "Points West" feature in the Saturday Evening Post, late '60s. Always entertaining, interesting writing. Check out her interview with Jim Morrison of the Doors.
3
Ah, how good in our overly competitive America to see one gifted writer pay sincere homage to another gifted writer. Thank you, Mr. Bruni!
15
As someone who's been an enormous fan for the past 35 years or so, have to admit feeling a slight sense of pique when all the NPR mom-types jumped on the Didion bandwagon after TYOMT and somehow thought they "got" her. Thank you Frank for mentioning "Bethlehem" and "White Album", two of the finest collections of essays in American letters.
6
Hey Glenn Baldwin, I had no idea that I was one of the "NPR mom-types" who jumped on the Didion bandwagon! But that's me! Better to come to her late than never, no? (I'm glad you felt only "a slight sense of pique.):-)
And thanks to Frank Bruni for this homage to a writer whom I have come to appreciate more and more.
Is the NPR mom-types moniker supposed to be an insult? I read Didion in the 70s and 80s as well and I very much appreciated what she has to say on grieving as I have experienced the same type of grief. There is no "getting her." People get what they want out of others' writings.
1
"mom-types", ick. The rampant sexism in this culture is just sickening.
2
With every sentence, paragraph, and her brilliantly rendered disappointed God-voice, Joan Didion rewrites some patch of errant software deep in my brain.
But, for me, it’s all about the content. She is saying things.
“When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issue advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”
-Insider Baseball (Political Fictions)
Are you listening, Frank Brunis of the world? Or is it all about your love of sentence structure?
10
"... innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
I wake up, click on the article, read this phrase, and my life's stages are explained to me. I am still reeling. Joan and Frank, you have done me more good than any therapist could have.
25
Ms. Didion simply told the truth. And, so beautifully,
3
As a very young woman, I adored and collected Didion's works but was never able to articulate my devotion. Thank you, Frank!
4
"Its detour was its music." Yours is a pretty nice sentence, Mr. Bruni. Thanks for the great piece on the great writer.
13
When I was in the Navy in 1969 I encountered a dog on acid at an off-base crash pad populated by the major heads from our squadron. I remember thinking at the time that it was a good thing that none of these people had children. Later, while stationed in Oakland I encountered stoned pre-schoolers in an apartment while on a pot quest. Certainly no saint I, but some things are truly beyond the pale. As for Didion's encounter, I am not certain that she did not feel revulsion. I am certain that she dutifully reported to us what she saw. I have always appreciated her voice. A good explainer of societal phenomena needs a carapace of ice sometimes.
5
She captured the angst and the ethos of a generation. But that was a long time ago.
3
"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges." Nabokov, Lolita
7
"Genius for sentences" is right and also not enough. It falls into the surface insult category along with "word merchant." What good writers do is let us see who they are. It's not playing with words, forming arrangements of them. Good writing is the hunger of the soul for what is true. Does it stir you, lift you, plunge you into new dark places, give a hint a sense a flick of light that is now part of a richer you?
Writing is a way of searching, and is "successful" when it comes closest to glimpsing something new, something clearer, a hint of what is what was what can be, and in the end and all through, it's the writer's person. It's not her words, it's she.
6
Interesting to read your praise of another writer - much of what you write could be about yourself. Your take on social issues is clear succinct entertains an always on point. I look forward to your column because it helps me organize my own thoughts and reactions to the bizzare times we are currently experiencing. We have 5 adult children and I frequently share your articles with them as well - we all need a dose of sanity so we know we are not the only ones who are so perturbed by what we are seeing. Thank you
12
The best is when a writer, in this case Bruni, strikes a chord that is precisely your own. As a, now retired, high school administrator, I for years recommended "On Self Respect" to high school seniors and their teachers. I recently gave copies of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" to two of my granddaughters. both 18 and off to college. Of course, I highlighted "On Self Respect." And the sentence, "Once in a dry season..." Years back, I was reading the essay with some of our students. One asked, "What does that mean - "In a dry season...". Another blurted out: "Doesn't matter. Great line." He was right and, I hope, a writer himself.
8
Describing the music heard in the connectivity of words combined into a sentence reminds me of when I was making gift baskets for The Silver Palate on Columbis Avenue in the ‘80’s. My boss wanted to know how I had decided which items were going into each gift basket. And I confounded him with my answer that as I made each prototype, I was listening for the music I heard when the right composition of gift items had been assembled.
Your words “syntax and sensibility” also make beautiful music together!
Thank you for your always great writing.
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It seems confusing that so many old hippies have such a high regard for Ms. Didions very critical view of what the hippies transformed California into............
No question, Ms. Didion is a very, very gifted writer and keen analyst. I only encountered her books recently, and by accident, without knowing the whole history of her popularity or even knowing a single thing about Joan Didion.....I wouldnt have known her from Adam.
but as I read.....I found I had to read more.
My personal take is that Ms. Didion is proud of her California Pioneer heritage and is sad to watch it fade away, unable to withstand the tides of time....now nearly obliterated by narcisistic, selfish, narrow-minded impulses, people who no longer produce anything but have completely surrendered to the moment.
4
While I acknowledge that the genius is born regardless of race, religion, across time and region of the planet, I do believe that the talents such as Didion has to be nurtured by the atmosphere of the times (60' and 70'). Remember Graham Green/Orson Wells famous statements, "You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love--they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Look what we have now, Donald Trump?!.
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Never liked her writing. Her Year of Magical Thinking had absolutely no magic just a lot of pedestrian thoughts - many many people including myself have actually experienced inexplicable events surrounding deaths. So that book was an absolute bust for me. I have always seen Didion as someone who is not very talented, just very lucky.
5
I concur. Were I to rename, "A Year of Magical Thinking," I would call it, "The Courage to Despair." Didion's celebrity, yes, derives from her gifts as a writer; but it also derives for the perfect congruence of her reflections with the needs of our own need to frame our collective despair, as virtuous, as courageous, as inevitable.
1
Kind of like the way the Rolling Stones aren’t talented.
"I have not been the witness I wanted to be." The last line in "A Book of Common Prayer". I read the book when I was young, and now at 72, I fully comprehend the meaning of the last line of that novel. Joan Didion has always been a favorite writer. Nice tribute Mr. Bruni.
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After viewing the documentary, I was struck by her continuous courage. Ms. Didion has not hesitated to follow a difficult path. The topics she has covered have included a personal breakdown, the loss of her daughter and husband and an extremely dangerous war in El Salvador. Her writing has helped me make sense of my own experiences.
6
The Year of Magical Thinking is a gift for anyone who is grieving. There is no real synonym for grief. Didion lets the process of grief unfold. Poignant, not syrupy, not maudlin. I wish I could thank her personally for assuaging my own grief, but I do so by passing the book on to others.
27
Well worth watching. Enigmatic. Artist of words. Takes the reader into her head, which for me, sometimes brings me peace knowing that others think as I do, even if our thoughts may not be the same.
9
I was very fortunate to have read her early in life and as each new book was published. I loved her writing without really understanding writing the way Mr. Bruni does. My favorite was usually at the end of the chapters. It was often the last paragraph or even sentence when it felt like she plunged the dagger with her conclusion, often twisting it just so. She has a brilliant and precise style.
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Frank, it starts with "genius sentences" but it only progresses with "genius actions."
After we read magic words from Didion and others, we need the moral doings of loving and serving one another. Want an example? Dorothy Day. It's her birthday and she should be a canonized saint.
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I forgot the last two sentences: So should we. Forget the canonized part.
for one reader, likely lots more, dideon's genius was in the precision with which she struck common chords...her summary of the frame of being (if not conscious mind) among those of college age in the 1950s "the ambiguity of belonging" in the most general sense and "the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood” more specifically, could not have been more congruent with the 1950s experience.
that some of us came to her equally elegant expression of wakening at twenty eight, in a rush a few years sooner was due to the fact that instead of college we were in uniform.
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Although a lovely sentence, if it's indeed true, then I was an adult at 9. And I wouldn't say abasement is the gateway to adulthood. Perhaps humility. But thank you for drawing my attention to reading Didion and studying her style.
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I read Year of Magical Thinking several years ago. When I lost my husband earlier this year, the words of that book guided me through some very sad days. The shared experience of not wanting to disturb his books and other personal things helped to know someone shared my experience. I have told so many widows and those not yet in this position to read her book. It is profoundly insightful of what feelings arise when someone is suddenly gone. Thanks Joan.
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If Bruni loves Didion's words, it seems Didion loved words too.
Her documentary is "The Center will Not Hold." Her essays "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Taking inspiration from Yeats is a sound base for a beautiful way to string words together.
For me, the sentences that stick, that bubble up as explanations for the world around me, often come a line or two at a time from poets. (Trump has sent me to the War poets: Wilfred Owen's "Was it for this the clay grew tall?" resonates.) I wish we spent more time, I wish we could spend more time, in schools demonstrating how authors and poets can put words together in a way that is so precisely right, that they continue to bubble up for the rest of your life. But we are fighting the good fight just to keep most kids on track to learn how to express themselves cogently, logically, and understandably to worry about trying to show them art.
So thanks to Frank Bruni, for pointing out that words are as fundamental to art as color and form are.
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A word is dead
When it is said
Some say.
I say
It just begins to live
That day.
wrote Emily without fanfare
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Like good food, strong landscapes, and lasting melodies, Didion's work is better experienced than explained.
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"Much of life cannot be explained. It can only be witnessed."
Shantideva, 8th century Buddhist monk
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I must admit, I have not yet read, "A Year of Magical Thinking," which clearly from comments below had a powerful resonance. I do remember vividly the first sentence of "The White Album": "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Concise, perfect, accurate. Didion's prose always illuminated stark reality and eternal questions on the razor's edge. Like Updike, she revealed truths of existence we haltingly contemplate, lest we know the truth. To Hroswitha; I agree Laurie Anderson and Rickie Lee Jones, Sirens of our social age.
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I have a strange relationship to Joan Didion: she came in first place in Vogue's Prix de Paris and I came in second. She got the job at Vogue and I got married.
Eventually, we both honed our talents: she as a brilliant writer, I as a successful journalist.
I am still hoping that one day we will meet!
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Not only is her writing masterful, but the insights put forth by her perfect prose are devastatingly keen. Her piece for the venerable NY Review of Books on the Teri Shiavo case is not only the best analysis of that dark chapter of history but one of the best essays on the intersection of self-serving politics and "law" ever written. It should be required reading for every politician.
22
Another person on this thread asked, where are the Joan Didions of today? Where are the luminous writers of her talent and insight.
I would say to you, that one should look not only at authors, but look to the poets and the melancholy musicians for insight into the psyche of America.
I watched Heart of a Dog, the expressive and magnificent paean to life, death, and her husband Lou Reed, by Laurie Anderson. It was every bit as rich and deep and lyrical as Didion's work, and I would wager that Anderson has long been a fan of Joan's work.
Look, too, to the haunting and haunted work of another American master, Rickie Lee Jones. Her piece, Atlas' Marker, is a master's class on how to weave themes and musical styles across genres, making myth meaningful in new ways, while Traces from the Western Slopes beckons with images from a blasted American landscape. Lolitas playing dominoes and poker out behind their daddy's shacks, indeed.
Essayists and poets, the Didions and the Dylans, the Cohens and the Bowies. The translators of the muses who can inflame our hearts and enlighten our minds. Bless them all. They reflect perhaps not what we want to see, but always what we need to see.
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Amen!
1
Music, and food, universal language.
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I cannot imagine my life without Joan Didion. From my earliest years as an undergraduate at Berkeley and onto everything since she has been essential to my connection with the world. God bless her.
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How complicated is my relationship to Joan Didion and every other writer I've read who wrote about my life. Born in LA and lived in California, until at the age of 50, I moved to New York. Long ago "Slouching" knifed into my own Nathanael West filtered SoCal, and her appropriating my Santa Anas howling through hot wind-scrubbed skies, and wrapping them in raw nerves and Yeats, affirmed my dislocation but also drained some color from my own experience. I had to get away, easier to deal with Dostoyevsky than Didion. The largest, most detailed, important experience is ours, yours. Maybe Plato was right, we are just telling each other stories about living in the cave. But you are all correct, she is a wonderful writer.
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Amen
9
I think she had the guts to explain to us why life was, at root, melancholy and often miserable. She conveys misery in very specifc ways.
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Indeed. She once wrote of experiencing a cold during a flight. A reader could feel it.
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
"MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains..."
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The chains are fitted at the font
The citation about happy and unhappy families is the first sentence of the 19th c. Russian novel, Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy.
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In these days of our slouching toward oblivion Didion's luminous insights and shining sentences are some solace. Especially "you cannot prepare for misfortune."
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When words fail me, as they frequently do these days, I frequently seek out my betters.
Here are the closing lines of H. L. Mencken’s famous obituary of William Jennings Bryan -- a three-time Democratic candidate for President -- whom he encountered at the Scopes Trial in Dayton, TN. Written in 1925, it reads as if it was written yesterday, the day I last read it.
“The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment's notice.... At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides {of Prohibition) and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."
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I can't thank you enough for this. We can't blame the stars.
3
This description could e describing Trump as well.
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A. Stanton--
I always look for your comments. Thank you.
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Dear Frank Bruni and other admirers and appreciators of the prose of Joan Didion: A book about her essays, by Clifford Thompson (the Whiting Writers Award-winning author of "Love for Sale and Other Essays"), will be published in 2018. Its title is "J. D. and Me: A Personal Take on Life, Race, Family, Jazz, Blues, Politics, and Guns—via the Work of Joan Didion." This illuminating book about a brilliant essayist by a brilliant essayist will be a gift for all of you.
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Try Montaigne, a brilliant and amusing essayist.. and you can practice your French! Erasmus is fun,too.
The Dunne movie on Netflix is a work of love and care and worth seeing more than once.
What I find equally moving are the tributes to her here in the comments section.
The question now is, where are the new Didion's? That eloquence is needed as much now as it was when she first burst on the scene in the 60's.
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All through this past generation's headlong embrace of STEM, the humanistic balm of the written word and of considered thought has been at best obscured and oftentimes cast aside. It is denigration of the humanities and the liberal arts that has brought us to this present sorry moment in our history.
Thank you for your wonderful column Frank.
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I adore Joan Didion’s writing and always have. But to encounter a 5-year-old on LSD and to react not with horror, but with unvarnished glee for the value added to a story, is morally bankrupt. If not downright reptilian.
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Her response is jarring. I assume she meant the image of the girl spoke volumes about the nature of that time. Do we really know what she actually felt?
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You are right. Let's please admit that Didion is a thoroughgoing elitist. The long sentences - like some of Fitzgerald's - have the charm of leisurely elegance: Vogue for the literati. The slightly corrupt perfume of nostalgia marks them. The admiration for markers of elitism is a very American thing, maybe pardonable in young people, but now in old age I have to deplore it.
4
Who says she didn't react with horror? She was asked a question five decades after the fact. She remembers the moment now for the same reason it is remembered by anyone. It's an incredibly tragic twisted moment from a time that was twisted in its own unique ways. She is and was a reporter. A recorder of the times she lived in. She had long before this moment as well as long after known and cultivated the value that belonged to her alone as that of the coolest of observers. She seemed almost to be exaggerating her emotional detachment from the moment as a response to THESE times, when all the now familiar boxes must be checked in order to provide the requisite from square-one virtue signalling melodramatic moments. No surprise Joan Didion went another way entirely.
4
My loss, I know.
I first read Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, and I knew then I missed big time.
What a writer!
Frank, you have a way with words too, you know?
THANK YOU for this piece.
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All all that I've read of hers is The Year of Magical Thinking. I've been recommending ever since. I'm not a parser of sentences but I still love her writing.
15
Absolutely one of the greatest writers out there. I ate through her books, consumed them for any truth, any way of being.
13
Is there anyone who writes with equal talent about both the personal and the political?
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A reminder to send Mr. Bruni's political essay on pumpkin-spice to a friend with an affinity for pumpkins.
2
Cynthia Ozick
1
Joan Didion: California's Prose-Poet Laureate.
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I live in her home town. Her descriptions of the West are perfect. I went to a talk she gave at UCDavis in the '70s, she seemed so alone, fragile, vulnerable. She is a wonderful writer. She said her mother always responded to problems by saying, "what difference does it make". A metaphor for loneliness. She lurks in our souls.
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I used "On Morality" in a writing class that I taught. Didion wrote this as an examination of what we "know" is right and what is wrong. I think that if her idea is correct that our morals are based on how we treat each other--including people that are strangers to us, we might save ourselves.
16
I watched the documentary and was mesmerized by her. I can’t say that I was surprised. I have been reacting like that to Didion for years.
9
Those sentences are driven by the depth of her understanding. Without a keen perception of the tragedies and comedies of American life, she would never have written those beautiful sentences. Let's put the cart of rhetoric behind the depth of vision in our appreciation of Didion.
14
My first encounter with Didion was her essay on El Salvador. Her writing captivated me then and still does. I am just now reading her collection Slouching toward Bethlehem. One of my favorites lines of hers is from A Year of Magical Thinking “Life changes fast/Life changes in an instant/You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” That is one of the most profound expressions of grief I have read. Thanks Frank Bruni for this appreciation.
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The ability to say what she perceives or thinks so that it's clearly understood by anyone reading it in a manner that is as easy to follow as is a casual conversation.
10
Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking, changed the way I think. In this book, written after her husband died, she sort of expected to see him walk through the door. Rationally, she knew this was not true, and she didn't let other people know she was having these thoughts, so it wasn't like she was really delusional. But still, she kind of actually believed it.
The book made me look at other people, and myself, and wonder what kinds of magical thinking might be just under the surface; irrational half-beliefs or hopes that could be subtly changing the trajectory of our lives.
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We have to hope there will be enough people who read next year, and years beyond, to learn and practice the wisdom of writers. Among the many reasons for our nation's decline into Trumpery must be the diminished American vocabulary and consequent inability to appreciate how syntax can inform meaning and meaning can inform life. The "cutting-room experience" may not be a movie, but it nonetheless operates on meaning with a negative capability the good writers bring to the word and the world beyond. "Gaga for isolated sentences"? Yes, "as for whole books." It is almost as much to be a reader as to be a writer, and to be both, Mr. Bruni, is much appreciated.
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I'm a late comer to her work but somehow know that when words can be put to an inner state that is centered and real, we're enlarged as human beings. Looking forward to enjoying the documentary.
10
"The Year of Magical Thinking", so nails the experience of surviving a partners death. Didion manages to put down on paper grief and articulate sorrow in a way that is remarkable and fierce. Her nephew's documentary captures that unique vision and her response to the world around her in a wonderful, thoughtful way. I could watch it again and again and marvel at her ability to record history and the era of the 60's and 70's in a wholly personal and brilliant manner. She remains totally relevant at 82.
18
As a college student in the 1960's I had heard of Joan Didion, but did not read any of her books until a few years ago. I love memoirs and read a lot of them, but was never so drawn in to someone else's mind and perceptions as I was by her books. First I read The Year of Magical Thinking, then everything else by her that I could find. I don't know why exactly, but something about the combination of her acute observations and her intense anxiety made me want to know all about everything she saw and did
38
More than thirty years ago when I taught an Advanced Writing course in San Francisco, I used Didion's sentences as models for students to emulate: periodic, loose, and cumulative. But the power of her writing whether she was describing the Hoover Dam or Toulumne Meadows stayed created visual and acoustic radiance. I enjoyed watching her in the documentary recount 70's history such as Sharon Tate's gruesome murder or Haight-Ashbury on acid and relive that decade viscerally. Between her loss of John Gregory Duane or Quintana Roo Didion courageously mines her feelings. She is the real thing!
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Oh, my goodness gracious, Mr. Bruni. I have hoped for decades but never believed there was someone else out there who not only goes "as gaga for isolated sentences as for whole books," but who understands perfectly well that particular passion is both grace and some terrible attention deficit.
Back when I was teaching traditional college-prep literature courses (and loving it), I wrote and taught an Elective I called "The Personal and Social Essay," and Didion's "Salvador" was one of our texts, along with copies of many of those lyrical essays; The New Yorker; Harper's (when Latham was still writing those long essays every month);
One interesting writing exercise was when I handed out a sheet with probably ten of her sentences. The assignment was to pick two or three and imitate the structure--every prepositional phrase, every adverb, etc--but change the subject matter. The lovely result was that a much wider variety in sentence structure began to show up in student essays. Copying at first? No doubt about it. But those sentences of Didion stuck like glue when the copying was over and students who never paid the slightest attention to their writing began to experiment, play around. Gradually those training wheels came off.
Didion is a particular hero of mine. A brilliant essayist and wordsmith.
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I am also someone who absolutely falls in love with isolated sentences. Joan Didion is a master of this; she writes such gorgeous sentences that are also somehow still full of meaning and layered depth. Hers is truly a once in a lifetime talent and genius.
Gushing aside, I really love the exercise you described- it sounds wonderful for embracing that obsession of sentences in ones own writing. Thank you for sharing!
21
Thank you for mentioning "Salvador." Didion's and Carolyn Forche's writing on the vicious war of the government against its people managed to be powerful but not overwrought. I still have an image in my head that Didion described, someone learning to drive by an old quarry (I think it was) that was a favorite haunt of the death squads.
I need to find that old copy, or buy another, and reread.
4
Sarah D.: Carolyn Forché! Thank you so much for mentioning her. I was in the third grade when I first read her. I was as horrified by the experiences she detailed in 'The Country Between Us' as I was overwhelmed by the directness and majesty of her language.
Even all these years later I can still remember, verbatim, several of those poems. Forché wrote passages that I still count as among the most devastating deployments of the English language that I have ever encountered. She articulated journalism as poetry.
Two passages from her poems have particularly stuck with me. Randomly throughout my life these passages have coalesced in my mind, seemingly from out of nowhere.
The final two lines "The Colonel" still sear me from a distance of decades. From, "The Visitor": "It is a small country. There is nothing one man will not do to another."
Thank you for recalling Forché's work to me. It's wonderful to be reminded of that which is most precious.
1
Two years ago I found the Everyman's edition of Didion's collected nonfiction in a Brooklyn bookstore and was immersed in a summer of the keenest pleasure. I recently taught "Where I Was From" so that my students could experience her version of California's industrialization, a story that tragically resonates in this era of climate change. Didion is no environmentalist, but her rigorous observations, her insight into how social phenomenon connect, and her stoic sensitivity to demoralization, all make her telling of California's boom a national treasure.
32
"Where I Was From" is my personal favorite. After spending most of my life in both Northern and Southern California, I found it to be spot on in so many ways.
2
California is and always will be- beautiful.
3
My favorite Joan Didion collection is After Henry, published in 1992. Ms. Didion's work always made me feel less unsafe to march to a different drummer. It also has the economy and elegance of poetry.
16
Joan Didion is a treasure and I will definitely check out this documentary. After my son died suddenly at age 28, her books on her grieving after her husband died and her daughter's death a few years after gave me greater solace than any other book on grieving. The experience, I guess, is universal in many ways and she is able to write about it so that anyone who has suffered such a loss can completely understand and feel not so all alone. There is some comfort in that.
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I share both your sudden loss of a son and your feeling about The Year of Magical Thinking. There were times that her astonishing writing surely kept me sane - that my experiences had been shared by at least one other human being in desperate grief. What a selfless gift to us and to all; I will be watching this documentary with gratitude for Joan Didion and her gift.
13
Thank you, Frank. After reading your op-ed, I downloaded and re-read “Goodbye to All That,” an essay that I hadn’t read in 40 years. I see now that I was too young at that time to appreciate it’s beauty and tough vision. She’s remarkable.
25
My mother went to school with Ms. Didion and my grandmother always remembered her as "Little Joanie". I still have my mother's high school yearbooks with Didion's class photos and activity summaries and I presently live around the corner from her childhood home in Sacramento. Because our families' histories in California ran more or less parallel back the middle 1800's, I felt more or less related to her. Yet I resisted in school from reading her work - I don't know why. Perhaps it was because I had aspirations as a writer and I knew I would be intimidated by the clarity and adamantine strength of her prose. I was right. She is a master.
46
Wonderful column. Like the greatest prose writers, Ms. Didion understands that the essential building block is the sentence. Here is one of hers I will never forget: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
73
Ok, Mark, you beat me to it!
With that sentence, Ms. Didion knocked me upside the head about 35 years ago. It's one of the touchstones I keep returning to.
9
I still, at the age of 67, have "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album" on my bookshelves, covers faded, bought when I was in my early 20's. Also on that bookshelf is "The Year of Magical Thinking," another masterpiece.
My favorite opening line is from the first essay in "The White Album", which reads "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Those words haunt me almost every day because of the truth they hold: no one can get through life being totally honest, we bend that truth in order to live, with ourselves and within the world. Thank you, Frank Bruni, for this column and the knowledge that there are other Didion fans out there. Thank for the reminder of her cantankerous brilliance.
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A beautiful appreciation! I loved the documentary with all of its flaws. I was captivated watching Didion's 82-year-old arms flutter about as she expressed herself. It felt like the depth of her emotional/intellectual being was so strongly tethered to words that every sentence came out with a torrent of physical energy - like a dancer of words. It made me re-read several of her pieces which are especially prescient for these challenging and dark times. What a captivating artist!
53
She has been a favorite of mine for a long time. California Dreaming, indeed. How refreshing, thank you.
31
You are spot on about the beauty of her sentences. They can stay with you for a long time. I don’t remember the exact sentence but in The Year of Magical Thinking, there was a line that said something like : No eye was on the sparrow.
It captured her loneliness so starkly.
55
Bless you Frank Bruni for writing this. For decades, every few years I've returned to "Slouching" and recharged whatever it is that's at my core with those essays. "Goodbye To All That" is the finest piece of nonfiction writing I've encountered. I think I saw her one night on the subway a few years ago as I was going home from a performance at the Met as a blizzard was moving in. Not being sure it was her, and being a cool New Yorker, I didn't bother her, but ohhhh, I wanted to tell her how much those two collections of essays have meant to me.
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