Didion, Joan

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DIDION, Joan

Born 5 December 1934, Sacramento, California

Daughter of Frank R. and Eduene Jerrett Didion; married JohnGregory Dunne, 1964

Joan Didion graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in English in 1956, and in the same year became an associate feature editor with Vogue magazine in New York City. She remained at Vogue until 1963, the year in which she published Run River, her first novel. Between 1963 and 1969, Didion wrote essays and feature articles for Vogue, the National Review, Harper's, Holiday, and, most regularly, the Saturday Evening Post. Her first collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem was published in 1968, and in the same year she became a contributing editor of Life magazine.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem's essays, all published previously (the majority in the Saturday Evening Post) make a powerful statement about American society in the 1960s. The title essay describes the variety of young people Didion met in 1967 when she spent some time in Haight-Ashbury. It is a vivid narrative, a recording of actual dialogue conveying the pathetic naiveté of the "flower children," drifting through drug-filled days, their lives circumscribed by a few vague ideas rendered only in pale and repetitious platitudes. The other essays that comprise the first section of the collection, entitled "Life Styles in the Golden Land," are companion pieces to the title essay in that they either dramatize a desperation for immediate gratification or recall with nostalgia the old American values of courage, self-sufficiency, and privacy. In all of these essays, California emerges as the last frontier of American idealism, the place where people act out their largely vain hopes for peace, for community, for eternal romance. The two final sections of Slouching Towards Bethlehem consist of five personal essays and seven that seek to capture the peculiar spirit and flavor of a geographical place. These 12 essays mingle the objective and the frankly personal; they provide an insight into Didion's background and her character, which is observant, self-critical, unsentimental, and keenly sensitive to all types of irony and incongruity.

Didion has all the qualities of a brilliant essayist. Her themes are clear, her anecdotes dramatic, her style swift and crisp. In addition to their merit as models of prose style, her essays increase our understanding of her fiction. "Notes from a Native Daughter" narrates the history of the Sacramento Valley, the setting for Run River, and "Los Angeles Notebook" depicts this city as one of impersonal tensions, while providing sketches of the barren relationships we find in Play It as It Lays.

Between 1971, the year in which her second novel, Play It as It Lays appeared, and 1977, Didion concentrated primarily on her fiction, pausing only to do an occasional screenplay with her husband. (Didion and Dunne collaborated on the screenplay for the film version of Play It as It Lays, and on the script for the Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born.) Her novel A Book of Common Prayer appeared in March 1977.

In 1972 Didion alienated many feminists with an essay in the New York Times Book Review that attacked feminists for their tendency to become obsessed with trivia. The essay makes explicit a view of women that is pervasive in her fiction; women share, she believes, a "sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death." In the same essay, Didion attacked narrow feminist interpretations of literature, expressing the view that since the writer is committed to the "exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities," all political interpretations of literature must of necessity represent a distortion.

Ironically, there is much in Didion's fiction to appeal to the true feminist. Each of her novels concerns the experience of women—their relationships with men, with their parents and children, and with each other. Maria Wyeth, the central character of Play It as It Lays, feels her closest bonds with her daughter and her dead mother; Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator of A Book of Common Prayer, is not only the strongest and most rational character in the novel, but also feels a sisterly bond with Charlotte Douglas, whose life and death form the subject of the book.

Didion's deepest concern, however, is with the illusions on which people build their lives, illusions made necessary by the death of old values and the absence of viable new ones. Her novels dramatize the consequences of social, economic, and political change that occurs so rapidly as to produce disorder in individual lives, in families, and, ultimately, in whole societies.

In Run River, set in the early 1940s, Didion studies the younger generation of two old families of California's Sacramento Valley. In this work, Didion demonstrated the qualities for which her fiction has become known—swift action, convincing dialogue, and the ability to render complex female characters struggling to find purpose in a disordered society. The chief weakness of the book is the wooden character of Everett; as the pivotal male figure loved desperately by the two central female characters, he required sharper delineation than Didion gave him.

Play It as It Lays is a biting portrayal of a world in which people use each other to gain success, recognition, or sensual pleasure. Because men possess most of the power, women are especially likely to be victims. As narrator of the novel, Didion is unobtrusive, completely neutral; she simply presents Maria's thoughts and actions. As a consequence of her technique, the reader is not sure of her attitude toward her central character. Some reviewers of the novel considered Maria the victim of a brutal society; others considered her malevolent. The truth lies somewhere between these extreme interpretations. As a child/woman, Maria is far too fragile for the society in which she lived; however, through her passivity she participates in her own exploitation so her breakdown becomes, in effect, a self-confirming prophecy.

In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion's strongest female character yet serves as narrator. This is Didion's most ambitious novel in several respects; it has the most complex narrative structure: since the narrator met Charlotte Douglas late in both their lives, she must convincingly reconstruct all the previous action involving her. It also has the most complex cast of characters, four of whom—Charlotte, Grace, and Charlotte's two husbands—are fully developed, and the most complex setting, with scenes in San Francisco, New York City, and several Southern cities, all interlaced with scenes in Boca Grande, a fictitious Central American country Didion renders as convincing as any of the other locales.

In these two novels, Didion has refined a tight and colloquial style, stripped of any expansive descriptions or explanations. The strength of her fiction resides in this dramatic style, bringing the reader close to the events and characters and to render complex, often ironic, relationships through pure dialogue. Since 1979, most of Didion's work has been nonfiction; she has published only one novel, Democracy (1984), which is fiction appearing as nonfiction, even journalism. Didion places herself in the book as a narrator recounting the story of the Christian and Victor families and of their rise and eventual fall. Deliberately blurring the distinctions between fiction and journalism, Didion creates a convincing narrative, especially in its climax against the backdrop of the U.S. evacuation of Saigon and the fall of the city.

The White Album (1979) is Didion's second collection of essays, most of which were previously published in such magazines as Esquire and Life. The essays record her response to events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including reflections on the Manson family, and a return to the subject of Hollywood, described here ironically as "the last extant stable society." The volume also reprints Didion's essay on the women's movement, which caused considerable controversy among feminists when it first appeared in 1972. Didion takes less political looks at Georgia O'Keeffe, writes about personal experiences with migraines and travels in Hawaii and Bogotá and even includes her own psychiatric evaluation.

Salvador (1982) is a difficult, extended essay documenting Didion's two-week stay in the country. In one sense a travel diary, the book seeks to provide insight into the complexities plaguing Central America. She presents the conflict in El Salvador with little explanation or background; the confusion of the narrative mirrors the senselessness of the violence and hate she finds there. Often the people she meets who are involved in the fighting do not seem to understand the conflict themselves. Quite scathingly critical of American involvement in the crisis, Didion finds the "mechanism of terror" to be beyond irony. Salvador is Didion at her most despairing.

In Miami (1987), Didion analyzes the many complexities of the society, culture, and politics of a city of exiles and racial groups deeply at odds. Within the context of the history of U.S.Cuban relations and its many failures, she explores the diverse views and feelings of Cuban exiles and the impact of the experience of exile. The book richly demonstrates Didion's ability to see the many sides of a difficult and confusing situation.

Didion's ability to recognize, imagine, and capture a variety of viewpoints and her mastery of the language establish her as a major writer. As critic Joan Zseleckzy concluded, "It is not any journalist who can write a novel. It is not any journalist who can tell a story." Didion has continued to contribute to a variety of magazines, particularly the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and to write screenplays with her husband (including 1996's Up Close and Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer). All of her work takes an honest, often cynical view of politics, society, personal relationships, even of Didion herself. A master of language and prose, she conveys ideas succinctly in a spare but eloquent style. Believing that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," her work continues to be driven by her sense of moral urgency.

In Didion's recent literary offering, The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), she weaves a web of covert operations and cloaked assassination attempts in a stunningly written arms-deal-for-hostages story making it all too clear that American foreign policy is not always created by branches of the government. Told in the objective, almost disembodied voice of investigative journalist Lilianne Owen, the reader follows along as the reporter reconstructs the story 10 years after its actual occurrence.

Didion's format in The Last Thing He Wanted is quite effective. The reader is led through the journalist's reconstruction of the story and, in effect, eavesdrops on the "raw notes" dictated into the journalist's tape recorder. Lilianne is an enigma. She very often seems to be the protagonist Elena, but reminds the reader she (Lilianne) is only reconstructing Elena's story. An interesting approach, especially since the reader is never given much information about Lilianne.

When asked why she wanted to write a thriller such as Last Thing, Didion replied, "I had never written anything that depended totally on working out a plot, where everything has to mean something. It was a technical exercise. It is quite hard to do, but quite interesting." The result is some of Didion's finest work.

Other Works:

Telling Stories (1978). After Henry (1992, in the U.K. as Sentimental Journeys). Some Women (1992).

Bibliography:

Friedman, E. G., Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations (1984). Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism (1986). Hanley, L. T., Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory (1991). Henderson, K. U., Joan Didion (1981). Merivale, P., ed., Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the Art of Joan Didion (1989). Pearlman, M., ed., American Women Writing Fiction (1989). Winchell, M. R., Joan Didion (1980).

Reference Works:

CA (1969). CANR (1985). CLC (1973, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1985). CB (1978). DLB (1978). DLBY (1981, 1986). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other reference:

America (5 April 1997). American Literature (Oct. 1987). Booklist (July 1996). Commentary (July 1977). Critique (Spring 1984). Esquire (June 1990, Mar. 1996). Harper's (Dec. 1971). Hollins Critic (Oct. 1989). Ms. (Jan. 1973). Massachusetts Review (Spring 1983). NR (25 Mar. 1996). NYTBR (3 Apr. 1977, 17 May 1992). PW (13 Nov. 1987, 24 June 1996). Saturday Review (Apr. 1982). South Carolina Review (Spring 1989). Working Woman (April 1982).