“These people are never just people, they’re deliberate choices held up as icons for some purpose greater than their simple existence, and like most things humans do, the act of choosing says much, much more about the choosers than the choices. The act of anointing Joan Didion as our favorite, our best, our everything, is the act that reveals what we’re trying to say: that we’re cool, that we’re educated, that if we are not young and white and slender and well-dressed and disaffected and sad and committed to the art of writing as an arduous and soul-sucking process that must be endured yet Instagrammed simultaneously, then we will be, at least, as close as possible to those identifiers even if it kills us. Joan Didion, as a writer, is the perfect cipher for the writing process: that mythical time of creation where you are consumed by a painful, wrenching, autonomous urge to lay bare your thoughts, and the resulting sentences are beautiful enough to take away the breath of anyone lucky enough to read them. They remove all oxygen from the writer, leaving only a shell of a woman at her most beautiful: frail, small, weighted down only by a silky dress and nothing as obtrusive as actual human flesh. But it is not, I maintain, Didion’s responsibility to correct this mob mentality. And it is not by any means her fault, despite the opinions of her detractors. In 1979, Barbara Grizzutti Harrison published her essay railing against Didion, ostensibly—though it seems like an indictment of the people who like Didion more than a critique of Didion herself. “Didion’s ‘style’ is a bag of tricks,” Harrison writes, and then produces a series of sentences parodying Play It As It Lays; she accuses Didion of only ever writing about herself, even when she’s supposed to be reporting on a crime; and at the end, Harrison concludes that “Didion’s heart is cold,” the ultimate crime for a woman. The whole thing is smart, and well-written, but it reads like Harrison lost a dinner party debate and is listing all the things she wished she had remembered to say when a chorus of friends and colleagues jumped in to defend Didion. For me, the cruelest sentence is the first: “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 Roo; 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.” This is almost unbearably painful to read for reasons I’m sure Harrison would have me executed for: there I am! Right in that sentence! There’s my Instagram account, with the page of the Sontag journal I’m currently reading held just so you can see my fresh manicure; there’s my collection of zines propped up conspicuously on the dresser in my bedroom, so visitors can see my eclectic taste; there’s my writing, carefully constrained sentences that hint at my mental health issues, my sex life, my recreational drug use, revealing my inherent coolness while pretending to casually conceal it. My sympathies lie with my aesthetics, my possessions, my personality bending to material whims and tasteful trends, and not the other way around.”
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