Issue 87: A week in my life as a Joan Didion superfan

... even though I may not be one by the time the week is done

Welcome to The Joan Didion Group Project - a month of reading dedicated to one of America's most influential and celebrated writers. This post is too long for email, so if you care to read it in its entirety, you would have to read in a browser.

When I decided to do Joan Didion month, I set three basic goals for myself:

1. Focus on reading her novels because I’d only read Play It As It Lays and that was a while back.

2. Have non-fiction lined up as a back-up because I don’t remember especially loving Play It As It Lays but know that I have loved The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights and Slouching Towards Bethlehem

3. Set out the exhibit catalogue for Hilton Als’s Joan Didion: What She Means and just go through it bit by bit as the month goes on.

Thursday 

I made a quick library run and checked out:

• A Book Of Common Prayer (1977)

• Democracy (1984)

• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

I didn’t do any Didion-related reading because I was still basking in the aftermath of my Sally Rooney romp last month and wanted to finish Conversations with Friends. I really liked it!

Friday

I pulled all the books I had to work with - the three novels above + some nonfiction options.

Sharing photos on this Substack has made me realize that I have a very co-dependent relationship with my dog. She is always near me, it seems.

The nonfiction options I have are:

• Joan Didion: The Last Interview — a collection of interviews dating back to the 1970s. I had read some of them but not all.

• South and West — This came out in 2017 and is based on notes Didion took while traveling in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana in the 1970s as well as notes about California. I am curious to see what her notes to self look like.

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem — I love this collection but it’s been a long time since I’ve read it and I thought I would just add it to the pile and pick up here or there if I feel like it.

Later in bed I read the Dave Eggers interview in Salon (featured in The Last Interview) and in it, they discuss The Last Thing He Wanted:

DE: Your fiction seems to be getting increasingly lean, your essays seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

JD: They're getting denser and denser. There's a whole lot of stuff going on in a piece — you're trying to think it through. Generally, you think about a question or a situation in a more complex way than you would make a scene. Novels are almost like music or poetry — they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

Joan’s description of the novels coming to her as poetry got me intrigued and so, it was decided - I would begin the month by reading The Last Thing He Wanted. The interview gave me a little bit of context + it’s a political campaign novel which I like and feels timely. 

Saturday ~50 pages

My favorite day and time of the week: Saturday morning, book, bed, coffee. It’s when I feel truly happy, without the rush of the week. I try to start books on Saturday mornings, something I learned from my friend Kate Jones. I agree with Kate that it's best to start a new novel when you have a solid chunk of time, especially since some books take a bit to get into. But once you're hooked, you can easily read them in smaller snippets.

OK. We are finally reading. But… this is confusing— who, what?! So many names and places, really atmospheric, fragmented writing. I feel like I must start annotating, maybe I am just not focused and need help. But this is a library book. Ugh. What to do?!

These are the exact transparent Post It notes that I used. Pens and pencils did not work on them for me, but Sharpies were great.

In an unexpected stroke of early morning genius, I figure it out. I grab some transparent post-it notes, stick them to the page and use a fresh sharpie to underline. It would work better with wider stickies, but other than that… I am pretty pleased! I will take my notes as I do, then remove the stickies before I return the book. I read about 30 pages and then life calls.

I read another 20 pages at bedtime. Annotating is helping and I a story is starting to emerge. It took ~50 pages.

Sunday ~20 pages

Sundays are busy family days but I do manage to read a little bit before bed. What I know at this point is that a reluctant journalist-narrator is telling the story of Elena McMahon, a political reporter who walks off her job as a campaign reporter covering the 1984 United States presidential election and goes to Florida to visit her father. I don’t have a good sense of why exactly she feels compelled to leave but when she goes to her father’s house, she discovers that he seems to be experiencing symptoms of dementia while also still being active and “in business”. The business in question is not entirely clear but there’s parts of the operation that involve illicit activities — weapons trafficking?! — to and from Costa Rica?! ~20 pages.

Monday ~20 pages

This is going to be a busy week at work — jobs, remember those?! Who else around these Substack streets sometimes forgets that writing our little newsy-letters does not actually pay the bills?! I am feeling preemptively agitated that I have emails to write, and decks to build and projects to kick-off when all I really want to be doing is curl up with my little Joan Didion book. BUT, I am also determined not to allow all-or-nothing thinking to ruin my day.

So, instead, I take five minutes and search for Spotify playlists that will create a Joan Didion inspired vibe for my day. The internet does not disappoint and I find a perfectly titled playlist — The Feminine Urge to Read Joan Didion — and we are off to the races.

I know that not everybody will agree with me but to me reading is not only the time I spend literally holding my book, reading the words on the page. For me, reading encapsulates the entire experience of immersing myself in the world of the book and learning about the author who wrote it. Obviously, it wouldn’t be reading if I didn’t read the actual book… but I do believe that thinking about it more broadly, I have been able to find grace for myself when life gets busy, or my depression takes over and I just … can’t even. I can still find a way to enjoy reading, without necessarily eating pages for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

At bedtime I read ~20 pages.

Tuesday ~10 pages

Tuesday is just a blur and I am tired and anxious. I read about ~10 pages. At this point I am about 80 pages into this book and it is starting to feel a little annoying. The energy is very specific — just kind of frantic and piece-y. Like, I can obviously tell that Joan Didion has made specific stylistic choices to keep the narrative structure from being a traditional political thriller — but the effect it has on me is like a montage scene from Homeland where the female protagonist — white, pretty and thin — finds herself in a place where she shouldn’t be… but it all still feels like a whole lot of set-up and I kind of think it’s time that we get things going. I get so annoyed that I actually google this and realize that The Last Thing He Wanted is a movie starring Ben Afleck and Anne Hathaway. I rest my case.

Wednesday ~20 pages

I got a good night sleep and feel better. I hope for more reading time later in the day and am determined to push through what is starting to feel like a hump for me. Typically around this point in a book, I am pretty clear whether I want to keep reading or not…. and, I’m going to be honest with you… if it wasn’t Joan Didion and if I wasn’t doing this for this challenge… I would have probably stopped.

But just like every single time I leave my house, I leave for work with the book in my purse and hope that the tides can still turn.

I bring my book with me every time I leave the house, including Monday night when I went to crochet class. Spoiler alert, I didn't read while I learned to crochet but now I am obsessed with the idea of crocheting while listening to audiobooks.

I carried the book in my purse both Monday and Tuesday but didn’t read it while out of the house. Today I had a quiet lunch all by myself at work and managed to read another ~10 pages. Again, I am reminded of how soothing to the nervous system reading can be. Even spazzy political thrillers such as this one.

I am typing this up on Wednesday night and as soon as I schedule for publication, I plan to read until I fall asleep. I wish I could just read the rest of the book in one full swoop but the truth is that this book is just not that intriguing to me and I suspect I will probably go to sleep after 10-30 pages. I will finish it, but I am feeling a little sad that I don’t love it. Can I call myself a Joan Didion superfan if I strongly dislike her fiction? I am already starting to think that the plan to line up some nonfiction was not a bad idea after all.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Joan Didion Land:

• Memory Goes MIA — Political storytelling and Didion’s Democracy
  by Abra McAndrews

• Joan Didion's Blue Nights — A heartbreaking re-read that left me in pieces
  by Kate Jones

• The Didion Key — Forget it Jake, it’s Literature
  by Patrick Lowler

• Allison Bornstein decodes Joan Didion’s timeless style
  by me + Allison Bornstein

I am really enjoying reading these and look forward to all the essays that people have signed up to write later in the month.

Some questions for you:

Have you read any of Joan Didion’s fiction? What did you think?