The Los Angeles Review of Books gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of the publication of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” That attention to style, structure, perspective, and meaning animates these essays by Matthew Specktor, Susan Straight, Amy Wilentz, Amy Ephron, Richard Rayner, and today Meghan Daum, who recounts a life of reading Didion and getting a haircut in her kitchen in 2003.
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Joan Didion
Blue Nights
Alfred A. Knopf, November 2011. 208 pp.
When I began seriously reading Joan Didion, in my early twenties, my response was less “this is amazing” than “this is allowed?” As is the case with many young writers, early encounters with Didion felt to me like a revelation, a shocking and delightful window into what it meant to forge an intimacy with one’s readers while remaining duly mysterious. You can do it like this, the pages seemed to say. “This” meant the jagged, labyrinthine sentences, the unashamed brandishing of personal demons, the perennial list making. Moreover, that such stylings were permissible, that the work appeared in the most prestigious places and had made its author not only a success but an outright star, felt like a victory not just for words but for sound. To me, reading Didion’s prose has always been an aural experience as much as a literary one, as much about rhythm and intonation as whatever she’s talking (or in many cases not talking) about. It’s been about those long, earth-orbiting sentences that are almost always followed by short, decisive ones that let you catch your breath. It’s also about wondering, for those of us too young to know, what a cotton shift is. Or how she wants us to pronounce “detritus.”
Blue Nights, like 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking — and in some ways like the 2003 essay collection Where I Was From — has the hallmarks of relatively recent vintage Didion. That is to say, it’s sparer and more elliptical than the 1970s-era works — Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Goodbye To All That — that are often described as seminal and that have had generations of young writers copying her style by eschewing commas and throwing in references to cigarettes or prescription opioids wherever possible. An almost incomprehensibly tragic coda to The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicled the sudden death in 2003 of the author’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, Blue Nights takes on the demise of her 39-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, who died 18 months later.
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