Issue 91: The Paradox of Admiration
Gutted by Joan Didion's misguided critique of the Women's Movement
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
— My boy Charles, describing my literal experience of reading Joan Didion
Y’all. I was EXCITED to open The White Album and read The Women's Movement essay. How ready for it I felt. How much I looked forward to seeing the movement that’s inspired so much of my adult life through the eyes of one of my favorite thinkers.
And how painful the betrayal I experienced when I finally did so.
How excruciating the disappointment of facing the writer who has taught me to trust what I see... in a scenario where they are almost willingly, alarmingly, determinedly blind.
Joan Didion's personal essays—think On Keeping a Notebook, On Self-Respect, Why I Write, On Being Unchosen By The College Of One’s Choice—with their sardonic observations and crystalline prose, feel so generous. So vulnerable and self-deprecating. In their idiosyncratic specificity, they are so universally appealing. Yet there is always something else beneath the surface of Joan Didion’s work: a careful cultivation of insider status, as meticulously maintained as the Republican values she was raised with (I think she believes that’s what being from California is like). Her pages are studded with casual references to Joan Baez, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin—a glittering constellation of names that serve less as characters than as credentials.
This same impulse is on full display in her savage dismissal of the Women's Movement and, to be honest, gutted me. In the essay she sneers at how the founders of the movement invented a revolutionary class, then had to make that class conscious and, ultimately, the attention they garnered was mired in the trivial.
That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, Didion argues, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.
She mocks the childhood expectations and misapprehensions of women in the movement, at some point making fun of an ex-wife and mother of three who speaks of her plan to move to New York and work in publishing.
The childlike resourcefulness — to get a job in publishing, to become a gifted potter! — bewilders the imagination.
… she condescends while failing to recognize how she had similarly invented herself as that most precious of creatures: the woman who didn't need feminism because she had already secured her place at the table… in publishing, nonetheless. Having resentfully gone to Berkeley instead of her coveted Stanford and later married her editor might have something to do with it, I suppose. The casual classism lands like a slap.
I spent the weekend fuming, half-expecting to get over it… but the disconnect feels even more painful this week, as Michelle Obama warns about women becoming collateral damage in men's political calculations. So disoriented by the essay, I find myself Googling "Was Joan Didion anti-feminist?"— which leads me to Barbara Grizzutti Harrison's magnificent clapback:
When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer—not entirely facetiously—that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo1; I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator's having pleated instead of gathered her new dining room curtains.
The portrait is devastating: not of America's finest woman prose stylist, but of a neurasthenic Cher, more concerned with perfectly pleated curtains than the fabric of society coming undone.
Yet even Harrison's critique feels too simple. Didion's style—her ability to name the unnamed feeling, to capture the precise texture of a moment—does not really feel like mere window-dressing to me. It's a tool for truth-telling, even if that truth is limited to the contours of her own experience. Perhaps it was precisely this limitation—this careful curation of both her social world and her prose—that both enabled her precise personal observations and crippled her political vision. The same tools that made her a masterful chronicler of individual experience made her dangerously myopic when confronting collective struggle.
She accuses feminists' of desiring romance over revolution, claiming they merely wanted a new life in exactly the mold of their old life… The ideological underpinning of the movement, she argues, is dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish‐fulfillment, self‐loathing and bitter fancies… that results into the unproductive construction of the Everywoman, characterized primarily by her victimhood which she considers thoroughly exaggerated. She does so, of course, while missing how her own privileged position allowed her to dismiss and avoid the systemic barriers that trapped countless women in lives they couldn't simply choose to leave. Her libertarian individualism, so beautifully suited to memoir, feels cruel when applied to politics.
As my month of Didion draws to a close, I realize that reading her work in 2024 is an exercise in growing up. Her essays on grief, on home, on memory, on writing remain startlingly relevant, while her political commentary feels increasingly like a time capsule of a time long gone. I cried over it but eventually sobered up to the fact that, after all, mommy is only human.
In case you missed it, Substack featured a bunch of excellent Joan Didion writing in this past weekend’s digest:
Call it The Month of Magical Substacking. (Or The Orange Album. Or Substack It as It Lays. Or Slouching Towards Substack. We could keep going, but we won’t.)
Someone somewhere is always reading Joan Didion. Someone somewhere is usually writing about reading Joan Didion.
I squealed when I saw it! THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!
Below is our updated running list, including some essays on Didion that are not explicitly part of this project but belong with the Didion gang. Please let me know if I somehow missed your post:
Book Review: Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted...
by Seagull’s Wings who actually got inspired by The Joan Didion Group Project to publish their first Substack post!!! I feel so honored!
Joan Didion's California — A Reflection on Identify and Where I Was From
by Megan Gibbons
Cranky Joan Didion holds a grudge — Having fun with Joan Didion's 'Let Me Tell You What I Mean'
by me
On being butthurt — Writers' notebooks, "privilege," lugubriousness, and more
by Elif Batuman
I don't want to be Joan Didion — yes, yes. Writing about writing.
by K. Claire
by Alex Dobrenko
by Abra McAndrew
Didion’s dissonant details — Is Joan Didion always writing about Joan Didion?
by Christine Tsai Taylor
by Milena Billik
Book Review: 'Run River' by Joan Didion — Published 1963
by reem
I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be — Joan Didion on keeping a personal notebook
by Kolina Ciceroby Leah Beth (Leah Beth wrote this in September and I don’t believe she is aware of this project)
Memory Goes MIA — Political storytelling and Didion’s Democracy
by Abra McAndrewsJoan Didion's Blue Nights — A heartbreaking re-read that left me in pieces
by Kate JonesThe Didion Key — Forget it Jake, it’s Literature
by Patrick LowlerAllison Bornstein decodes Joan Didion’s timeless style
by me + Allison Bornstein
I am so grateful to everyone who chose to share reading and writing hours with me this month and I hope The Joan Didion Group Project inspires you to create your own reading project. The biggest gift you can give yourself is to take your own mind seriously.
Some questions for you:
Do you share my complicated feelings of love and profound disappointment with Joan Didion?
If you participated in this reading challenge, what do you think will stick with you from this experience?
When I messaged my friend
to whine about my disappointment, she said she also always found it a bit colonialist that Didion would name her daughter Quintana Roo that.
Cleanse your palette and right your emotional ship with a dose of Nora Ephron. Guaranteed to make you feel seen, and give you some good laughs as well.
“Mommy is only human.” Haha. Yes. Reminds me of a warning Lili Anolik gives readers of Didion & Babitz: reader, “don’t be a baby!” I think Joan’s contemporary, less successful friends, like Eve Babitz, felt the same way you describe, that this essay was a betrayal. In her new book, Lili Anolik takes apart the way Joan climbed, how heavily she had to lean on the men in her life to advocate for her in order to have her success she did. I don’t know if John was ever her actual official editor with a publication, but according to sources in Anolik’s book, he and Joan worked very closely that way. AND that source insinuates she married him because he, another man who had helped her get published and the one she may have truly loved, told her he’d help her career most.