There are few writers as visually distinctive as Joan Didion. We have glimpses of her as a young reporter with her delicately poised silk scarf and anorak. A decade later we see her on the porch of her Malibu home, casting an ironic glance at her partner and daughter in the foreground, the Pacific Ocean fading out cinematically behind them.
These images are part of the selling power of the grand narrative fiction of Joan Didion — an image that evokes an era when a life in writing might naturally distil glamour. Whole generations of writers continue to make themselves in the fantasy of her image, though the affordances of a life in writing are no longer what they were.
Becoming Joan
Born in 1934 to middle-class Sacramento Republicans, Didion was part of the old Californian elite, a position that distinguished her from the liberal tones of mid-century journalism. “The New York Times brings out in me only unpleasant agrarian aggressions”, she wrote in an essay, noting her preference for underground women’s journalism and The Wall Street Journal. Her taste is in keeping with her lifestyle and generation, which her partner, John Gregory Dunne, described as “post-war Malibu.”
Didion, who prided herself on the legacy of her Californian self-reliance, was never shy of making money. She tested the market for her belongings during the Kickstarter campaign for her 2017 documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne. Offerings included $350 USD to have the author read a two-page letter, $35 for a handwritten list of her 12 favourite books, $50 for a pdf copy of her recipe book, and $2,500 for a pair of sunglasses from her personal collection.
Didion’s shadowy identity
Having spent much of her middle decades among Hollywood actors, Didion was too good at her game to give anything away. The closer you look at the writer, the further she, like the wily protagonists of her novels, recedes from view. It was a trick that she acknowledged in the preface to her first collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive…that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests”.
Didion gave up her mall dreams to produce a more marketable commodity: her own literary persona, who chronicles the American worlds that are unravelling at the seams everywhere she turns. In her best, though least read work, Democracy, published the year of Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, she appears as the character “Joan Didion” who holds together a late imperial map of a country that has turned up an explosive blind alley.
Most aspiring young writers will be unable to afford the Didion memorabilia they covet, but in the New York Times’s promise ahead of the auction — that fans can “acquire a piece of her legacy” — the dream of writing, and of California, is offered up anew.
By Jess Cotton, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English, University of Cambridge
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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