Issue 88: Cranky Joan Didion holds a grudge

Having fun with Joan Didion's 'Let Me Tell You What I Mean'

Oct 17, 2024

Joan Didion is often painted as the epitome of cool detachment. This perspective is not accidental... and nowhere more evident than her essay about Ernest Hemingway where she writes:

The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence is dictated by a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source.

She describes a favorite author but these words could have been written about her. Whether she's examining the counterculture of the 1960s, the political machinations of the 1980s, or her own grief in the 2000s, Didion's gaze never wavers. She is forever willing to look directly at what others turn away from.

And yet.

In the forward to the 2021 essay collection Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Hilton Als, one of her closest friends and keenest readers, playfully brings attention to what he refers to as The Opiner - a perspective most evident in her earlier nonfiction and characterized by a “decidedly emphatic, cranky tone”. The essays in this collection, spanning from 1968 to 2000, reveal a Didion who can barely conceal her judgy-ness and can definitely hold a grudge.

This different side to her not only runs counter to her mainstream reputation but is also a source of unexpected, often hilarious, insight that — to me, anyway — only makes her work even more compelling.

In the opening essay of the collection — Alicia and the Underground Press (1968) — Didion eviscerates mainstream publications for pretending to be "objective" while not disclosing their apparent biases. She contrasts them to tabloid media, underground publications and - Gasp! - the Wall Street Journal:

The Free Press, the EVO, the Berkeley Barb, all the other tabloid-sized papers that reflect the special interests of the young and the disaffiliated: their particular virtue is to be devoid of conventional press postures, so many of which rest on a quite factitious "objectivity." Do not misread me: I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer's particular bias. For the writer to pretend that he has none lends the entire venture a mendacity that has never infected The Wall Street Journal and does not infect yet the underground press. When a writer for an underground paper approves or disapproves of something, he says so, quite often in lieu of who, what, where, when, how.

What she appreciates about these publications is their capacity to speak to her directly, even if she has little to no interest in what they actually have to say. It's a backhanded compliment, it seems, but indicative of what she values as a reader AND a writer - a certain straight-forwardness, a cogency of style.

In Getting Serenity, an essay from the same year, Didion writes about a series of Gamblers Anonymous meetings she attends in Los Angeles (I am unclear if she is there as a reporter or a participant) and growing increasingly annoyed with the "predilection of many of the members to dwell upon how "powerless" they were, how buffeted by forces beyond their control.” When multiple members of the group describe their desired state as one of serenity, she is finally unable to take it:

I got out fast then, before anyone could say "serenity" again, for it is a word l associate with death, and for several days after that meeting I wanted only to be in places where the lights were bright and no one counted days.

Joan Didion, who trusts the Wall Street Journal, has no patience for your vulnerable bullshit and is obviously not afraid to share her barely contained disdain for self-help. She is judging you, yes. So sue her.

As she gets older, the sharpness of her wit turns inward. Her essay Why I Write (1976), is famous for producing the now iconic line:

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking.

… but that fragment does not fully encapsulate the sardonic self-deprecating feel of that essay. The emphasis is mine:

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

She is even more brutal and judgmental elsewhere in the essay:

During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed.

My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the Bevatron up the hill.

She can't think, she self-diagnoses. She can only write about what she can "see and taste and touch, on the butter, on the Greyhound bus." She may be trying to be straight-forward, own her stuff, etc. ... and maybe she is not trying to be funny... but she is too self-possessed and self-aware to simply be trying to publicly humiliate herself. There is humor in her judgy-ness and a light-hearted arrogance to boot. Take it or leave it, she seems to be saying. This is all I got.

Which is not to say that there isn't a tinge of bitterness in her self-described limitations. As a grown woman, she writes a whole essay on being rejected from Stanford, for god's sake! She gets into Berkeley instead and still can't quite let it go, until a friend of hers at Stanford asks her to write him a paper on Conrad's Nostromo:

I did, and he got an A on it. I got a B- on the same paper at Berkeley, and the specter of Rixford K. Snyder (the Stanford Admissions Dean) was exorcized.

😂😂😂

In Telling Stories (1978), Didion tells us how in order to deal with the paralyzing fears that accompanied the publication of her first novel Run River — Reem is reading it and will be writing about it later in the month — she decides to again try her hand at writing short stories, just to be met with rejection after rejection. The experience is so humbling that she promises to never write another short story again but not before she gives an itemized list of all the publications that rejected her AND their exact reasons for doing so:

... It was wrong for the Post, not so much because of its subject matter, but also because of the oblique method of narration.' The New Yorker: 'as a whole it just isn't effective enough. Ladies' Home Journal: 'too negative for us.' McCall's: I feel very bad about rejecting this story not because I think it's really a well worked-out story but because the writing is so awfully good. She has a very special way of involving the reader.. but I'm turning this down, reluctantly, because I don't think it's a successful story in the end. Good Housekeeping: 'marvelously written, very real, and so utterly depressing that I'm going to sit under a cloud of angst and gloom all afternoon... I'm sorry we are seldom inclined to give our readers this bad a time. Redbook: 'just too brittle." Atlantic Monthly: 'I hope you'll be sending us more of Joan Didion's work, but this didn't make it, so back to you. Cosmopolitan: (sent twice due to change in editorial staff) 'too depressing.' Esquire: no comment. Harper's Bazaar: While THE WELFARE ISLAND FERRY is almost my favorite among the stories we have published ... I feel that WHEN DID MUSIC COME THIS WAY? is not quite as good. Vogue:' not quite right for us! Mademoiselle: 'unable to use this particular story. The Reporter: 'alas, not right for The Reporter.

I asked Claude.AI to pull me a list of the 20 Adjectives Most Commonly Used to Describe Joan Didion and here's what I got:

1. Incisive
2. Observant
3. Detached
4. Precise
5. Elegant
6. Introspective
7. Analytical
8. Cerebral
9. Melancholic
10. Sardonic
11. Unsentimental
12. Enigmatic
13. Influential
14. Stylish
15. Perceptive
16. Cool
17. Eloquent
18. Insightful
19. Penetrating
20. Understated

These adjectives reflect Didion's distinctive writing style, her approach to journalism and personal essays, and her public persona. They capture her ability to observe and analyze culture and personal experiences with a sharp, often detached perspective, as well as her significant influence on American literature and journalism. But... with all due respect... I need to make my own contribution to the canon and add one more: PETTY AS ALL HELL.

And, I hope it's clear that as I have gone through the trouble of documenting a set of Joan Didion's almost juvenile afflictions - her crankiness, her judgy-ness, her inability to let go of a grudge... I hope it's clear that — to me — all of this makes her even more perfect. To borrow from the title of the last essay in this collection, we love her because she is EveryWoman.com.