She is, at heart, a reporter - a very good reporter. And despite her frequent references to her emotions, she isn’t an op-ed columnist. She isn’t a moralist, a theologian, or a philosopher. One distinctive feature of Didion’s writing is her frequent quotations. “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969,” she writes in the concluding paragraphs of “The White Album,” “at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. “I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have a knife.” This sense of impending doom, legitimate paranoia, defines Didion’s writing. Her two essay collections, Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, threw the entire cultural narrative into question. “She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only thing off about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick.” Perhaps her most chilling recollection: a five year old on acid. In a time when many writers were romanticizing the ‘free love’ movement, Didion recorded some hard realities. Didion turned the essay into a literary art form - a taut, trembling, electric current of truth. And yet this odd role of host-to-the-who’s-who of the day gave her the freedom to observe.
Janis Joplin showed up late one night, asking for a “Brandy-and Benedictine in a water tumbler.” “Music people never want ordinary drinks,” Didion wryly notes, “Spending time with music people was confusing.” Writers and artists came in and out of the Didion-Dunne house at all hours of day and night.ĭidion, naturally reserved, naturally suspicious, was a unique and unlikely host for this array of flamboyent guests. Harrison Ford, a carpenter at the time, built their deck and became a family friend.
This was a time when a society heiress was photographed with a machine gun robbing a bank insisting her new name was "Tania.” This was the time of the Manson murders, college protests, the Black Panthers, the Beatles.ĭidion and her fellow writer husband, John Dunne, created a literary, cultural salon of sorts. Didion lived in a California rife with murder, drugs, kidnappings, and dissapearances. In fact, history itself was an open book to be rewritten, expunged, edited to suit the moment. The assumed social narratives were being questioned, tossed aside. She never stopped asking, what stories are we telling and why?ĭidion wrote at a time when the world was, quite literally, in flames. She questioned the infantalizing motives of many members of the women’s movement.ĭidion wrote, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” She didn’t glamorize hippies or rock stars. She was skeptical of the Central Park jogger case media narrative. She wrote with unflinching sharpness and a shocking independence of thought during a time when so many seemed ready to leap into group-think. Yet, despite this undeniably bleak outlook on the world, Didion is one of the writers I admire most. “She lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.” Didion records a psychiatrist’s description of her outlook on life: Her writing leaves little room for feelings other than dread, unease, and confusion. Her novel Play it as it Lays remains one of the most haunting, existentially bleak books I’ve ever read. That frail frame, those large eyes, the cigarette dangling with an air of cultivated disinterest.
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