Slouching Towards Didion
What Joan Didion Taught Me As a Reader
When I was a teenager, I had not read many women writers. In fact, I hadn’t read many books by anyone. The few books I read as a child fell into these categories: action-packed boy stories, some books my mum forced me to read, and whatever I had to read at school.
Only a small handful of these books were written by women. As a child, I read Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven books with such ravenous joy that my future looked incredibly promising as a young spy—if only I had six friends willing to spend time with me. Then there was Harper Lee, who everyone reads eventually. And in my final year at school, I had to read Wuthering Heights, only to come out the other side changed.
I was a terrible reader. It would take me months to finish any book, and if it hadn’t caught my imagination quickly enough, I would simply leave it to collect dust and rewatch the entirety of The Lord of the Rings (which I did every school holiday, front to back, and then back to front). I’d spend hours in pure brain rot, rewatching The IT Crowd, Inbetweeners, Black Books, or Community for the tenth, twelfth, twentieth time. What I knew of the books by women I had heard of - The Jane Austens, The Brontes, The George Eliots of the world - was that they wrote about love and heartbreak. What good was that going to do an insecure, rather judgmental, increasingly angry, easily distracted boy who found it difficult to finish Animal Farm, all 100 pages of it? When would I need to pick something like that up? What would I personally find in those stories that spoke to me, selfish old me? These stories seemed almost banal. God knows how wrong I was.
Everything I read seemed to be written by a man, and I don’t think I realised this at the time. In a very foolish way, this made me think that all great writers were in fact men. This wasn’t helped by my parent’s favourite writers. My mum has a predilection for Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, and Martin Amis, while my father obsesses over Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot. So for years, my reading catalogue remained male driven - even though I could barely finish even those. What chance did I have?
As I began my literature degree (to get back at a teacher who said I might fail English at school), I eventually started to read what we can simply call ‘the canon of men’. I read Orwell. I read Salinger. I read Márquez. I read Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kundera, and Camus. I read the books that drew me into a vision of what life could feel like. And it’s important to say could, because my life would never be like the characters - or even the writers - of those novels. Instead, these writers paint a world where men walk as conquerors, takers of the world’s bounty. I became used to a specific type of voice, one that I already understood, where I saw myself reflected in the characters rather simple, and sometimes unoriginal thoughts. These masculine visions of sex, beauty, and triumph all drove home the desire for me to step out into the world and say, ‘Yes, I am here planet earth, watch me shine.’
Until one Boxing Day morning, when I saw the silhouette of a snake with the pink sunset going down on the name ‘Didion’.
On a beach towel with the sun searing through sun screen to scratch at the skin beneath, I read Joan Didion’s first novel, Play It As It Lays - unable to leave the beach until it was complete. It had been left on top of a pile of books by my mum - who knew I was having a Hemingway moment and felt it was time to broaden my horizons. The simple and striking cover caught my attention immediately, and noticing that the words were large and the chapters short, I chose to take it with me to the beach.
Joan Didion’s writing is firm in the way a writer like Austen’s could be considered smooth. Austen’s clean and liquid language lets the words flow seamlessly, painting the world in clean lines and colours. Didion’s sentences on the other hand have hard edges. They are reconstructed in unusual ways to milk meaning from words that she wants you to focus on. Take for example:
On the tenth day of October at quarter past four in the afternoon with a dry hot wind blowing through the passes Maria found herself in Baker. She had never meant to go as far as Baker, had started out that day as every day, her only destination the freeway.
In her careful placement of the action in each sentence, Didion makes her prose chug like a steam train. Her simple and direct language - influenced by her years as a child writing out passages of Hemingway - removes all additional material to hone in on the raw blankness of her subject. Almost always, this is California.
California lives in Didion’s eyes and mind as a great vacuum of all things that talk to the sick sense of the soul. A living, breathing emptiness. It’s where the countercultural changes of the 60’s and 70’s - which she experienced first hand - were birthed and quickly died. She captures this detached nothing with raw starkness in Play It As It Lays. Maria Wyeth’s story of failed dreams, drug binges, vapid love, suicidal tendencies, and roasting desert suns felt like a new world to me when I first read it. It took what I loved about the writers I had read and reshaped it into a warning masquerading as a story. My eyes flew across the page, and then would go back over the paragraph once more just so that I knew I had soaked it all in. Didion wrote in a way that made sense, and quickly became an idol of mine (as she does for many twisted romantics).
Play It As It Lays is a depressing story about a character who has become so disenchanted by the excess they surround themselves with that they begin to ignore the terrifying warning signs of a world gone mad. As Maria says towards the end of the book:
I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.
The story is distillation of several themes Didion tackles throughout her work, including depression, destabilisation, disintegrating marriages, and the downside of excess. The book can be deeply unpleasant and make you want to turn your head, but it always remains engrossing. You can see the book’s influence on writers like Brett Easton Ellis, whose Less Than Zero is basically Play It As It Lays for 80s disillusioned rich kids.
As I stand out in a crowd (seeing that I’m far too tall for my own good), I sometimes wish I could understand what it is like to view the world from a different angle. Didion’s presence in the rooms she entered was one of her greatest assets. Her height - five foot nothing - allowed her to quietly go unnoticed in busy rooms. In pieces like The White Album’s title essay, Didion’s viewpoint is no longer that of an individual, but of the room itself, watching and annotating. The world happens around her, and she records those happenings without any interference. She could sit in a recording studio with The Doors and happily record the aimless ramblings and wanderings of men waiting for the arrival of a singer who can’t stand up straight. Her astute eye and perspective allowed me to see that things were far more interesting on the other side.
This is wonderfully captured in her uncovering of John Wayne in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, who may be more symbol than symbiote:
I had never thought of him having dinner with his family and with me and my husband in an expensive restaurant in Chapultepec Park, but time brings odd mutations, and there we were, one night that last week in Mexico. For a while it was only a nice evening, an evening anywhere. We had a lot of drinks and I lost the sense that the face across the table was in certain ways more familiar than my husband’s.
This clear-eyed assessment is especially true of her travel writing. For example, her writing on the Salvadorian Civil War places you inside the chaos and horror of the conflict instead of telling you: ‘this is how you should feel’. As a journalist, she simply witnesses and then records. Rarely does she guide where the story will go. Her eyes capture and remove the sheen that might curtail the reality lying beneath the surface.
This can sometimes cause her writing to feel remote. There are essays of hers that I find so detached and analytical that the meaning of what she is trying to convey can get lost in a thicket of details. She has explained why she records these seemingly superfluous facts:
Why did I write it down? In order to remember of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?… How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.
However, this dissection of details and her constant record of the minute is integral to understanding her magnum opus: A Year of Magical Thinking.
Some years after ravaging those early copies of Didion’s writing, my mother and a very good friend suggested I read her memoir A Year of Magical Thinking. At first, I chose to ignore this suggestion, figuring that I didn’t need a book to tell me how to think magically (not that I actually knew what the book was about). Not long ago (after actually reading it) I suggested to another friend that they should give the book a try, only for them to say something very similar. I had to explain that in fact, no, it was not a book about transcendental meditation or magical realism.
A Year of Magical Thinking is about the year following the death of Didion’s husband, John. It is plainly spoken: painfully direct and starkly detailed. It foregrounds her journalistic eye, an eye that appears terrified of turning back on itself. Didion details the book’s events as if they are notes. She often uses the phrases, ‘I recall’, ‘I remembered’, or ‘I saw’ to frame the near-aimless days that follow something so catastrophic. She becomes a detective trying to make sense of the pieces that never quite fit together. It is her struggle to make sense of these details that makes the book heartbreaking. By the end, she gives up on trying to understand these small details. She lets them go, only to forget them as we all do in time.
Didion is capable of making the reader feel something deeply in A Year of Magical Thinking without being didactic. She is not a guide, but simply as a purveyor, and that makes her writing universal in a way that I never believed writing could be before I read her.
Through this, her writing becomes a form of remembrance - even if the trips and meetings are most dull. Martin Amis once offered his critique of her style of writing:
She feels that she is responding accurately to some extremity in the observed life - in the great and desperate human action she reads about in the newspapers, listens to on the radio and fragmentarily witnesses. Yet it remains true that writing, unlike living, is artificial, disinterested: it is not just another facet of reality, however clamorous and incorrigible that reality may sometimes seem.
It is hard to trust Amis when it comes to talking kindly of his fellow writers. He does express something true in his critique, but it feels more like an attack than a dissection. Didion’s writings can read like a detailed newspaper article, but that’s because they were. Even then, these pieces of writing never stop being individually hers. That is more than can be said for someone like Amis - whose work often spirals brilliantly upward before forgetting that it actually has to fall back to earth. At least Didion is always grounded, Mr. Amis.
Didion was defined by her writing. Where men often imbue their stories with their own ego, threading lines of personal judgement or frustration and even contempt into their characters, Didion does something remarkable: she lets the story dictate what we take away from it, writing the facts and not the embellishments.
I was going to talk about gender here, but I know Didion would rise from the grave and kill me if she knew a random man was trying to say something intelligent about gender on a Substack post, so I won’t. Instead, I will say that my love for literature has changed since my early days of reading. This might be because I’ve become softer over time. Not just around the waist, no, but in my heart. Didion’s writing remains hard - a rock whose prose rolls rather than sings, but it always strikes at something real. A reality where truth matters, which is more than can be said for a lot of literature.
When Didion died in 2021, it felt like a decoupling. Few writers in my life have had a truly profound affect on how I read, what I read, how I write, and what I should understand writing to be. I don’t always read her books and fall head over heels, but I always admire her willingness to tell a story for how it is - not how it should be. Every time I read her, I’m reminded that writing is powerful as long as you always seek something true.
Every time I’m on a highway, I think of her. I recall driving up the interchange onto the Anzac Bridge with all four lanes free ahead of me. I remember my hands turning the wheel to the right, and from that point on, I seemed to glide:
Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbour required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.
With a little help from Didion, my dreams are far more vivid and far more real than they ever were before. From Didion, all writing opened itself to me and I fell right in.
