“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be ‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, in the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
The above paragraph is the first one in Joan Didion’s fifth book, “The White Album,” which was published in 1979, about a decade after the Fab Four had released “The Beatles,” with its plain white cover.
I’m pretty sure that my reaction to reading a mimeographed copy of the paragraph in Professor Steinhoff’s writing class at the University of Maine at Orono was, “Wow, what a paragraph,” and I still feel the same way about it 40 years later.
Back in the 1960s Didion was one of the first writers to adopt what was then called New Journalism, in which she explored the cultural values of the time by using a subjective approach to reporting that included not only the facts but her personal feelings and memories as well. “Writers are always selling somebody out,” she once observed.
Didion was heavily influenced by the works of Ernest Hemingway, sometimes going as far as typing out some of his sentences so she could better understand how their structures worked in a text.
“To shift the structure of a sentence,” she wrote, “alters the meaning of that sentence as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. . . . The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind.”
In her 1968 collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion tried to explain her need to write. “The impulse to write things down is a particularly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.”
During the summer of 1968, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and hospitalized for a nervous breakdown in a California clinic that “diagnosed her worldview as ‘fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic and depressive.’” (Photos from around that time show her appearing sad, even while posing with her new yellow Corvette.)
A couple years later she shifted her focus to herself and her marital problems with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in her book “Play It as It Lays.”
In 2005 Didion wrote about the sudden loss of her husband in “The Year of Magical Thinking.” “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,” she wrote.
She later recalled, “I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right, but we were each the person the other trusted.”
In 2011’s “Blue Nights,” Didion wrote about aging and the loss of her daughter Quintana Roo. “During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.”
The writer of more than 19 books, a screenwriter of well-known movies including “A Star is Born,” and considered a brilliant observer of human behavior and culture, Joan Didion passed away on Dec. 23, 2021. She was 87.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at Jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
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