Life Changes in the Instant. The Ordinary Instant

Dear Reader,

This week I'd like to introduce you to a writer I discovered three years ago and whose work I started reading only recently.

You may know her quote: "Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant."

If not, her name is Joan Didion, and these words open her autobiographic novel "The Year of Magical Thinking”. The beautiful illustration of her up there is by Avery Nejam at the Candid Observer.

In this book, published in 2005, Didion relates the unexpected death of her husband John Dunne, also a writer, who she collaborated with and was married to for 40 years. “A Star is Born”, a movie re-released a couple of years ago for instance, is based on a play they wrote together in the 70s.

The Year of Magical Thinking is one of Didion’s most acclaimed works: it earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 and was adapted into a play which premiered on Broadway in 2007. It is recognized for the candid story it tells and the grief it depicts.

Relatable to many.

Unspeakable to most.

Unspeakable due to what Didion calls being "secretly crazy" i.e., hoping her husband would come back and truly believing she had the power to make that happen if she did everything right.

Didion eventually came to the realization that nothing she did would ever bring John back and she understood there was very little in life you could do right.

Didion expected the book to be about loss, but she discovered while writing it that it was about love and survival. How to survive, let alone live, surrounded by memories?

Writing her book was part of the answer.

Life dictated the rest as shortly after her husband's funeral, her lonely daughter Quintanna passed away.

"It is part of who I am now," Didion confessed in an interview saying the grieving process for her daughter hadn’t even started.

In 2011, Didion published "the hardest book" she ever wrote, Blue Nights, in which she threaded reflections on love, loss, parenthood, and aging. A book dedicated to her daughter and of which you can find an extract here, read by her.

This was ten years before the writer's death due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.

But who was Joan Didion exactly?

Joan Didion (1934-2021) was an acclaimed American writer of both fiction and non-fiction and a style icon. Born in Sacramento, Didion started her writing career at Vogue in NYC (see text "Goodbye to all that") before moving back to California.

She introduced her audience to the Hollywood lifestyle and the 60s counterculture reality through her keen sense for observation and her notorious detachment.

Although perhaps her writing wasn't detached. Perhaps the emotion is just depicted differently. Writing around the bush was part of Didion's signature and that gave a specific flavour to her texts.

In Play as it Lays for instance, her main character is bored and depressed, but neither is openly mentioned. Alluding at things and letting the reader judge for themselves was something Didion was known for.

She was also known for her versatility: she wrote fiction novels but also scripts and political essays, which she particularly enjoyed because of the research, learning and discovery process non-fiction involves.

This video sums up her life very well.

Iconic, wasn’t she ?

Well.

Some ask the myth of “Saint Joan of California” be revisited.

Some claim her writing style relies on mannerisms and tricks to hide her lack of substance (see "Only Disconnect" by Grizzutti Harrison). Others have pointed to her bias against minorities as she barely mentioned any in her California writings as if they had never existed.

I've only started my journey with Didion and look forward to finding out more about her writing, what she saw behind her notorious dark glasses and who she was as a person.

Her personal tragedy may have something to do with my next newsletter by the way and it will be a short story.

See you next Sunday to find out how.

In the meantime, enjoy your week.

Drewly yours,