Blog Post 1
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”
Joan Didion
California to Didion is defined by what her memory cannot let go. Didion speaks of the different parts of California; the street she lived on lined with Tudor style homes, and pillared mansions, or the residential section, Brentwood Park. Didion’s way of describing the cars on the streets of California. The losses that Didion faced preoccupied her, but no more than her writings about California. Didion’s writings a lot of the time spoke about her experiences of her everyday life, stuff she experienced, but written in poetic ways. Didion’s stories tell her living in California, the place she can most call home. Joan Didion gave Los Angeles its voice.
Narratives are how we not only make sense of the world but make sense in a way that its more communicable, more felt, it’s how we pass our feelings on. Narratives can tell stories, but they also tell connected stories. Didion’s narratives tell a larger story. The relationship between loss and living and writing to Didion was writing happens because of loss and living. Didion said “I write to find out what I think and feel.” Didion writing about hers stories of California, her stories of love, loss, tragedies, and adventure.
When Didion spoke about putting her manuscript in the freezer, she created this visual imagery of how she thinks about her writing. She puts no pressure on putting her words onto a paper, but rather letting her thoughts unfold as she rights. Didion’s passion for writing showed when she spoke about the five-year-old on acid. Didion said it “was gold.” Didion believes “writing is an irrelevant act,” that people are formed by the landscape they grow up in. She believed human achievement and that novels were about things you are afraid you can’t deal with. Didion wrote about her option to divorce from her husband, and of course, being Didion, she made her husband proofread the essay. Just this alone learning about Didion, it made her writing have even more of an effect. That her writing always was always close to her heart, she wrote to feel her own emotions.
I loved Didion’s poetic imagery to her stories about her journalistic achievements. She spoke of her husband and her daughter’s death with words that had such a lucid tone, though it was the toughest thing she had gone through. Didion’s writings were consumed of essays of California, people she knew and didn’t know. However, her stories that had the most affect were those that were of her personal life. Her writings about the streets of her California home, about her husband, her daughter, their deaths, Didion’s writing helped her formulate how she felt, and how she would react.
