Reclaiming Joan Didion
I was 16 when I first read Joan Didion. My AP Comp teacher passed out smudged, stapled copies of “On Keeping A Notebook” and “Why I Write” for discussion, and I read them and didn’t say a word. I didn’t talk in public much those days, and a classroom of 30 people still counted as “public.” But something in those two short pieces stayed with me. A few years later, I read “We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live”, a gigantic collection of Didion’s nonfiction, and her sentences made perfect sense, and at times seemed to define me. In the prologue to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, she writes, “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget my presence runs counter to their best interests.”
I wrote that sentence on an index card and stabbed it to my bulletin board, where it stayed for years.
It wasn’t until I was almost done with college that I realized I wasn’t supposed to love Joan Didion the way I did, that she didn’t belong to me. I’d connected to Didion because, like her, I’m temperamentally unobtrusive and neurotically inarticulate. But it’s the physically small part that matters. The cult of Joan Didion fixates on her weight, describing her frailness lovingly, like a zoom-in on an Instagram model’s thigh gap. If Tumblr were around when Didion was taking those famous TIME photos, you can bet they’d be tagged #thinspo. A 1979 New York Times review of Didion’s “The White Album” pays special attention to her thinness, detailing her measurements like a model: 5’2” and 95 pounds, and while visiting South America, “she contracted a case of paratyphoid and her weight dropped to 70 pounds.” Twenty-six years later, The Los Angeles Times’ piece on Didion’s book tour for her memoir about grief, “The Year Of Magical Thinking”, gives her measurements again — now 5’1” and “below 80 pounds” — and describes her body in detail before even mentioning her book’s title. Didion is quoted on her thinness, too: “For a while after somebody dies you can’t eat. I’m trying to eat again. I’ve lost five pounds. I [now] weigh in the 70s, so five pounds is a real issue. My friends call. They remind me to eat. It’s sort of embarrassing. We should all be able to take care of ourselves.”
I haven’t weighed 70 pounds since elementary school. I’m just an inch taller than Didion, but I’m more than twice her weight. And so much about Joan Didion — from her own words to the reviews about her to that Céline campaign that launched a thousand think pieces — is about her thinness.
Girls like me aren’t supposed to love Joan Didion. Girls who love Joan Didion are supposed to be physically small, understatedly beautiful, smoke cigarettes, wear dark sunglasses and be from California. They’re supposed to be smart and skinny, those two qualities intertwined. It’s as if somehow the weight of Didion’s words subtracts from the weight of her body, leaving her romantically frail and fragile. That 1979 New York Times piece explicitly links Didion’s weight loss to her creativity, describing how her illness led to weight loss and a “hallucinogenic image” that inspired her novel A Book Of Common Prayer.
For a while, I wanted to take Didion out of the cult of thinness around her: I insisted that the emphasis on her thinness was something the media placed on her, not something she sought out herself. But that’s not true. The heroines of her novels are uniformly “strikingly frail,” as Didion describes one of them. A few years ago, I read Didion’s novel “Run River” for the first time. One of the things that I remember most about it is that the female characters eat nothing but artichokes, and often not even that.
In 1979’s “The White Album”, Didion famously described her packing list, documenting all the things that she takes with her as she travels, a list that includes two skirts, two leotards, one sweater as well as a typewriter, pens and her house key. “Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture,” she writes.
It’s a subtle description of Didion’s thinness, the fact that she wears a leotard to “pass on either side of the culture.” In a leotard, my body looks pornographic. You know those tote bags with that photo of Joan Didion smoking glamorously? I want one, but I don’t feel like I’d be allowed to carry it — only thin, cool girls are allowed. I know that’s a neurotic, insecure thought. But that neurotic insecurity was what made me identify with Didion in the first place.
When I first read Didion, I took it as proof that I, neurotically inarticulate and temperamentally unobtrusive, could be a writer and reporter not just in spite of those traits, but because of them. When I saw more of the obsession with Didion’s thinness, I took it as proof that I was wrong, I couldn’t be a writer: Writers are thin and glamorous, and I am not.
I took a break from Didion, but I can’t stop loving her entirely. There is so much about her that I admire or relate to. In “The White Album”, she prints her psychiatrist’s notes on her, laying her struggle with mental health completely bare — and this was almost 40 years ago. There’s the way she blends into cultures and countercultures to write about people from John Wayne to Jim Morrison to her own daughter, with staggering insight. There are songs (“Do You Wanna Dance”) I’ll never listen to without remembering her sentences, foods (artichokes) I’ll never eat without remembering her characters. And there are, of course, those brilliant, perfectly formed sentences, her way with words.
Then there’s the fact that I’m writing this, and thinking this, at all. That quote about neurotic inarticularity being an advantage kept me going when I thought I was too shy and nervous to pursue a career in writing. In that first essay of hers I ever read, “Why I Write”, Didion writes: “Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: I-I-I. In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.” That introspection, that I-I-I, that confident, persuasive imposition — that is a Joan Didion I want to copy, free of any thinness or glamour, just the rhythm of those words, the brilliance of that sentiment, that feeling.
I want that, and I want it without the way she looks attached.
