Joan Didion documentary, 2025

 Just refreshed my love for the work of JD by watching a Netflix documentary of her life. What a fine human being she was, and what a writer! Most people know that she had an ancestor in the Donner Party—one that took the safer trail and survived. LA Times has a good article about the potato masher: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-12-27/joan-didion-california-narrative-of-manifest-destiny-and-a-potato-masher

By all means, see the Neflix documentary. Beautifully done and done with love by a nephew. In the voice- overs, we hear the way she talks and see the helpless drowning gestures that mark the futility she feels in observing the world and writing it. She walks right toward the object, both eyes wide open. She might have been an observer from another planet — one so edgy and alert that she ended up knowing more about our own world than we knew ourselves. See Wiki for book titles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Didion

including a small collected works called We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. It contains books that you probably haven’t read.

No, the center will not hold. It has not held. How well she knew that.

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Below is from Didion's introduction to her first overwhelmingly important book, the book that instantly made her the voice of her generation:

THIS BOOK IS called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for

several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem which

appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as

if they were surgically implanted there. The widening gyre,

the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank

and pitiless as the sun; those have been my points of reference,

the only images against which much of what I was seeing and

hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern. "Slouching

Towards Bethlehem" is also the title of one piece in the book,

and that piece, which derived from some time spent in the

Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the

most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one

that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first

time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomi-

zation, the proof that things fall apart: I went to San Francisco

because I had not been able to work in some months, had been

paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act,

that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was

to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to

terms with disorder. That was why the piece was important to

me. And after it was printed I saw that, however directly and

flatly I thought I had said it, I had failed to get through to many

of the people who read and even liked the piece, failed to sug-

gest that I was talking about something more general than a

handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads. Disc

jockeys telephoned my house and wanted to discuss (on the air)

the incidence of "filth" in the Haight-Ashbury, and acquain-

tances congratulated me on having finished the piece "just in

time," because "the whole fad's dead now, fini, kaput." I suppose

almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the

suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to

me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I

had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.

Almost all of the pieces here were written for magazines dur-

ing 1965, 1966, and 1967, and most of them, to get that question

out of the way at the outset, were "my idea." I was asked to go

up to the Carmel Valley and report on Joan Baez's school there;

I was asked to go to Hawaii; I think I was asked to write about

John Wayne; and I was asked for the short essays on "morality,"

by The American Scholar, and on "self-respect," by Vogue. Thirteen

of the twenty pieces were published in The Saturday Evening Post.

Quite often people write me from places like Toronto and want

to know (demand to know) how I can reconcile my conscience

with writing for The Saturday Evening Post; the answer is quite

simple. The Post is extremely receptive to what the writer wants

to do, pays enough for him to be able to do it right, and is metic-

ulous about not changing copy. I lose a nicety of inflection now

and then to the Post, but do not count myself compromised. Of

course not all of the pieces in this book have to do, in a "subject"

sense, with the general breakup, with things falling apart; that is a

large and rather presumptuous notion, and many of these pieces

are small and personal. But since I am neither a camera eye nor

much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever

I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.