WWJDS: What Would Joan Didion Say?
For years now as we’ve all watched and lived through the political and cultural turbulence in the U.S., there have been numerous occasions where I’ve wondered to myself: “what would Joan Didion say”?
Now Didion has died, and we’ve had no brand new writing from her since 2011’s devastating Blue Nights, which I was lucky enough to hear her read from at the Graduate Center right after it came out. I’ll never forget the host of the event, author Aoibheann Sweeney, literally sliding Didion’s chair across the stage, with Didion sitting in it, gripping the sides, holding on, it seemed, for dear life. The microphones, had been placed incorrectly, and it was somehow easier to move Didion than it was to move anything else on the stage. It was comical to me and the friend I attended with. But I’m not sure it was funny to Didion. That was ten years ago and Didion was in her late 70s but appeared frail, even then. I’ve worried over the years — waited, wondering when news of her passing would come, knowing it was inevitable.
When I first encountered Didion’s work (in graduate school), I was not a fan. I thought she was elitist. She was from a different time and place than I was from — an upper middle-class, west coast family; her life was so different from my own. She made references to things that were completely outside of my own experiences and understandings. It only took a professor who loved and appreciated Didion’s work to help me eventually see the craft, the insight, the brilliance of her essays. “The White Album,” “Goodbye to All That,” and “Sentimental Journey” eventually became work that I adore and even love to teach and share with my own students now.
We read Didion for her eloquent sentences and her astute cultural observations. In 2014 I developed a research assignment I call: “Be Joan Didion,” where I ask students to choose an event in recent history, research it with an eye towards how different people have told the story. I tell them to look for moments of tension, competing narratives, subtext — to notice whose voices are prominent and whose voices are absent, to search for people who have countered the master narrative and offered an alternative. When we read Didion, those are the qualities we observe in her work and we try to emulate them.
I don’t know if Didion left us any unpublished writing. I don’t know what the state of her mind has been, if she’s paid any attention to politics or culture or if she’s made any new work at all in the last 10 years. But I doubt that my moments of wondering, “what would Joan Didion say” will end simply because she’s gone.