“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”
I think a lot of writers, Didion included, write in order to make sense of things. In our minds, nothing ever really makes sense until we can put it on paper and make sense of it through the structuring of sentences and paragraphs. The sentence, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” feels like a way that writers can restructure the way that they think about the world into something more palatable than what we are given; it’s a way of coping with the world. In Didion’s world, it felt like that was the only way she could cope, was to restructure the world around her into something she could see concretely on paper.
Loss can often feel like an alternate reality to us. When we lose someone or something important to us, it can feel like a world alone simply cannot be reality, for it would be too hard to bare. In this way, writing about loss can be a process of healing. By wading through our tragedies and sorting out our feelings, maybe we can swim to the other side of grief. In February of this year, my grandpa died. He was the first close family member I have had the experience of losing. He had lived with me since I was in kindergarten; he made me breakfast, he got me dressed in the mornings, he took me to school every day, he took me to the swing set at the park where I demanded that he push me on the swing for hours — and threw an absolute fit when he said it was time to go home. There are albums and albums filled with photos capturing our fun together. I am quite sure that a loss like this — and a loss like the one Didion experienced over her daughter and husband — is something that you never quite recover from. It will never be okay that my grandpa isn’t here and that he won’t see another day of me growing and changing; so, the best we can really do is imagine a world in which he is. I write a lot of fiction and since February, I can’t seem to find a narrative without him in it. Whether it’s in the dreams of my characters, or a character himself, he is always there. I don’t know if loss is something we can ever make sense of as human beings, but we sure can keep writing in circles about it. That way, my new reality of him not being here doesn’t have to feel quite so real. I know personally, that this is the only way that I can live.
Didion also mirrors this confusion and the nonsensical within the very bones of her writing structure. In the essay, “The White Album,” the erratic structure evokes a scatter-brained feel to it — one that I think is quite deliberate. The subject and content of each paragraph varies, skipping through her eye-witness accounts of the 60s in a blurring non-chronological order. An initial reading might confuse someone; it might feel like the events that she writes about — sitting in the recording studio with The Doors to buying a dress for Linda Casabian — have no connection at all. This is both true and not true at all: these specific events have no connection and make almost no sense, just like the 60s — to Didion — had no connection and made almost no sense. But here, in this essay, on paper, in clean sentences and structured paragraphs, it made sense to her. That’s why Joan writes: to make sense of all that doesn’t quite make sense.
This is a photo of my grandpa where I see him the most: the woods.
