Three years after her death, I find myself having grown tired of Joan Didion. I am tired of the books about her and the book-length compendiums of her books. I am tired of her likeness in photographs, her presence in documentaries, and those of her sayings that have become repeated as mantras — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” and so on. I am tired of her style, her sunglasses, especially when worn in studio interviews, and her popularity among influencers, magazine editors, and young women who have found their guru in a bob cut.
Although the branding of Didion has surely accelerated since her death at age 87 in December 2021, those who doubt that it was well underway during her lifetime need look no further than the Chronology appended to what promises to be, mercifully, the final installment of the Library of America’s multivolume collection of Didion’s collected works. Surely, Didion is the only author canonized in the Library of America whose Chronology includes anything like the following item: “In January 2015 appears in an advertising campaign for the designer Céline, wearing a black pullover and oversized dark glasses.”
The present volume gathers Didion’s publications in the 21st century, the period during which she acquired her late-in-life, Bob Dylan-esque stature. In fact, the Didion renaissance can be dated to the 2005 publication of The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir that, in ruthlessly unsparing prose, detailed her attempts to reckon with the death of her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne. The book was a juggernaut. The Chronology helpfully tells us that its sales of 200,000 copies represented “the biggest numbers of her career.”
It is unfair to blame an author for the success of her own work, especially a work as intriguing and revealing as Magical Thinking, but Didion can be held responsible, for better or for worse, for seizing on the popularity of this book for the balance of her writing life. Instead of producing more fiction with the interest and excitement of Play It As It Lays (1970) or fresh journalism with the originality of her classic pieces on the 1960s counterculture, Didion churned out a series of self-referential works: a one-woman play based on Magical Thinking, starring Vanessa Redgrave, and a new memoir called Blue Nights, which, in the manner of Magical Thinking, scrutinized both her own increasingly perilous health and the tragic illness and death of her adopted daughter, Quintana. “I hadn’t dealt with Quintana,” Didion is quoted as saying about Blue Nights, speaking of her daughter’s condition as though it is something akin to material to be worked over — surely not an expression of Didion’s own sentiments or motivations but indicative of the risks of the confessional mode to which she had committed herself and on which her fans depended.
The rules of the game were this: Didion was to be read not for what Didion said but for Didion herself. As it turned out, all of these Didion-centric works were genuine literary events in a way that her books had not been for some time. Before Magical Thinking, long gone were the days when a book such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first and most revered collection of essays, was perceived as a cultural phenomenon. In fact, by the early 1990s, she had become such a specialized taste that she was permitted to title her latest collection of essays, 1992’s After Henry, in honor of her late editor, Henry Robbins — as though anyone, outside of the New York literary scene, would know who he was or why they should care. (To imagine a comparable act of literary self-indulgence, imagine the final volume of Robert A. Caro’s LBJ biography being titled After Bob in tribute to Caro’s late editor Bob Gottlieb.)
By contrast, the offspring of Magical Thinking offered Didion on terms acceptable and accessible to her new fan base. Somewhere along the way, the cool kids decided that the thing to do was to read Didion, and it did not particularly matter to them what of hers they read so long as it was in keeping with her brand. Her name looked awfully good in the Didot typeface with which it had been rendered on all of her recent books — the pleasing way in which “Joan” and “Didion” almost rhymed, and the lovely repeating of “D” and “I” in the first four letters of her last name.
Indeed, the present Library of America volume inadvertently illustrates how close to irrelevancy Didion had teetered prior to the restoration provided by Magical Thinking. Her 2001 book of essays Political Fictions is a respectable work of reportage, so long as readers remain interested in such au courant figures as Kenneth Starr and the new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, but Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003) is an entirely unoriginal contribution to its genre whose contents are scarcely more interesting than, say, one of Gore Vidal’s anti-Bush pamphlets. Writing about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Didion worries that “the meaning of the event” was being ignored “in favor of an impenetrably flattening celebration of its victims, and a troublingly belligerent idealization of historical ignorance.” Much of America’s intellectual class disgraced itself in its reaction to 9/11, and it pains me to say that Didion was no exception on the basis of her stated objection to the perpetrators of the attack being labeled “evildoers” and “wrongdoers” and her assertion that the Clinton impeachment and contested 2000 election represented “secular democracy itself put up for grabs in this country.” Where I Was From (2003), the other pre-Magical Thinking book included here, offers its author returning one time too many to the California that birthed her: The book is tedious and dull.
No wonder The Year of Magical Thinking seemed lively and relatable. Didion’s urge to talk to her deceased spouse, to set aside his shoes for his return, to authorize an autopsy in the hope that what felled him would be discovered and corrected, and to perceive forewarnings of his demise in hindsight are comprehensible to any reader who has experienced loss. “The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted,” writes Didion, who noted and described the condition with greater acuity than most.
With the benefit of hindsight, fair-minded readers can perceive, in Didion’s profoundly, unusually irrational reaction to her loss, an unfortunate consequence of a post-religious but still supernaturally inclined society. The great religions encourage the locating of meaning in death, but for Didion, the sorrow of losing her husband offered “the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” Didion gives the game away when she admits that, despite her Episcopalian faith, she never did believe the part of the creed that referenced “the resurrection of the body.” The trading of orthodox beliefs for new superstitions represents a decline.
Notwithstanding its virtues, Magical Thinking inaugurated the state of affairs under which we are still living: Didion mania. Both the stage version of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights have the flavor of sequel-itis: works produced to meet demand that fail to replicate the quality of the original. Blue Nights represents a reprise of the subject matter of Magical Thinking (illness, dying, and memory) in the same cryptic, pinched style: “Last spring, 2009, I had some warnings, flags on the track, definite notices of darkening, even before the blue nights came,” and “In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age,” and “I find myself thinking exclusively about Quintana,” and “Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else.” Blue Nights is a study in aphorism overload.
The final alleged “later writing” collected here is the unfortunate South and West: From a Notebook (2017), which jerry-built a book from two notes for pieces, from 1970 and 1976, about American spaces and places that remained, despite its author being very much alive at the time, unfinished. “At the time, I thought it might be a piece,” Didion wrote in an introductory note to the first section, reproduced here, which begged the question: Why not make it a piece now?
I would say that Didion making available such leftovers for publication was an insult to her readers. But as far as I can tell, her readers didn’t mind at all. They were as happy as clams. After all, they had a new book whose author was Joan Didion to read on the bus on the way to work. A few months ago, they had another book about Didion, Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik, and, in a few months, they will have another, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine by Alissa Wilkinson, due out in March.
And then another …
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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.