On Joan Didion: Essayist, Journalist, Memoirist, Novelist

This was a special session here at the convention called to explore the work of one of the most influential writers of our time, Joan Didion, who is now 84 and has been publishing since the 1960s.  Didion has been getting a lot of attention lately, including winning the 2012 National Medal of Arts and an upcoming documentary--see trailer.  Many believe that she's been neglected in the canonization of literature.

First Speaker: Leigh Gilmore, Brown University
Dr. Gilmore addressed Didion's two memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, both depicting the deaths of her husband and daughter, respectively.  Didion says that these books account "the mutual disaster of losing both of them."  These books represent a Style icon—the moment Didion has in occupying the space of grief in the public.  History is created in this moment; she asserts value and pain of loved ones.

Dr. Gilmore connects and compares this style to the way in which police shootings of minorities are publicized.  In ascribing dignity to the deaths of her loved ones--their lives and death, as well as her own grief, she makes it matter.  Public killings often shows the opposite. The international activist movement Black Lives Matter (BLM) insistently counters The Year of Magical Thinking.   BLM challenges media by circulating family photos, forcing police killings into public view.  Trayvon Martin, for example, is honored, as is the grief of his mother.  Didion's memoirs have structured the space of public grief.


Second Speaker:  Fanny Nudelman, Carleton University
Dr. Nudelman spoke on Didion's early essays and her interest in murder and her idiosyncratic use of the first person.  Referring to Didion's essay "The White Album," Nudelman asserted that Didion preferred closed doors. Unlike the iconic sign blessing both strangers and kin coming through the back door, Didion did no such thing in her California town during the time when Charles Manson was hard at work.  Didion's style during the New Journalism era of the 1960s and 70s, which experimented with hybrid expanded forms, relies on the methods of autobiography.  A reporter barging through the door (Wolf's image) denies perception under duress.  In "The White Album," Didion's controlled first person awaits catastrophe; she exerts control by refusing to avoid conventions that would link to the feeling of dread and fear.  She rejects a confessional mode--she insists that dread is rooted in history, but she never names the historical source.  Years later, readers learn that one source of her fear is nuclear war.  By the time she writes Blue Nights, there’s no longer any left to dread; the worst has come to pass.   The figure of the stranger at the door is diffused.

Third Speaker:  Casey Shoop, University of Oregon
Dr. Shoop  says that Didion wrote about Nixon early on. He was the flotsam of California, and he read westerns.  Didion's style, Shoop says, has always been generically western, a clear eyed realism.  Reganism, especially during the Iran-Contra scandal, changed her style.  Her language wasn't a political argument.  She made many attempts to characterize Reagan as the New West, but her style relied on the myths of the West.  Didion admitted later that she did not examine what she needed to believe.