On Storytelling, Meaning and Joan

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion

Stories are our key method for making meaning. We tell ourselves stories to make sense of the world. To make sense of who we are. Our identity is often so because of the stories we tell ourselves, of who we are and what we have experienced. I am a college student struggling with procrastination as I binge on Netflix, insomnia, and self-doubt while I drink my cold soda in a white Disneyland mug. Moreover, we take facts, the raw materials of reality (whatever that is) and arrange them in a pattern, often done to our liking or disposition.

Of course Didion’s opening line of the “White Album” implies that stories are fabricated, mere illusions we tell ourselves to make us feel better, perhaps safe, or at the very least to make us feel that life isn’t random. Yet, for Didion during the the 60’s this narrative fell apart with the realization that, “things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone.” This revelation (or anti-revelation?) was brought about by the turbulence and wild-west nature of the 60s with brotherly love, sex, and drug induced mind expansion leading towards an orgy of paranoia, senseless violence and ambivalent and at times benign upheaval.

Situated in the West Coast, specifically in Los Angeles Joan was at an epicenter for a variety of converging movements and experiences, the militant but well intentioned Black Panther movement, The Doors with there message of nihilistic and “apocalyptic sex”, and the utterly senseless, yet vaguely expected Manson murders. These experiences had the effect of puzzling Joan and made her reevaluate her understanding of the world. Yet, through these, at times exciting and erratic times, Joan arguably provided her best work.

Importantly, throughout her essay “The White Album” as well as in the documentary The Center Will Not Hold Didion comes across as someone who cares deeply about others. After the loss of both her husband and daughter Joan takes to writing about her experience with grief. Although she mentions how writing served as a coping mechanism for her pain her reason for doing so is telling, “The reason I had to write it down was nobody had ever told me what it was like.” Though her writing may not help her, “to see what it means,” she understands the value it can have for others and so documents her own experience with grief for the profit of others.

Interestingly, Didion’s reaction to her epiphany is to provide another narrative, another story for which to make sense of things, “If I were to work again it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.” And so, in spite of her growing anxiety that life is meaningless, she is compelled to organize the “flash cuts” if not into something that is intelligible or meaningful, then into something “electrical.”