I came to Joan Didion backwards, starting with the wry and savage essays of Political Fictions, and only later working my way backward through her oeuvre. It began in 2001. I was in college. It’s hard to remember now the terrifying political unanimity of that moment, the way that the deep popular cynicism and indifference of the post-Cold War, post-Clinton scandals evaporated on September 11, to be replaced by a furious national id that couldn’t brook the slightest deviation from a newly (at least, newly open) warlike national purpose. I was 20, a wannabe radical and political leftist, barely recovered from my more problematic adolescent dalliances with tendencies that we would later come to call the Alt-Right or the Post-Left. Political Fictions, which combined the aristocratic disdain for which Didion has been criticized (sometimes rightly, sometimes unfairly) with the needlepoint precision of observation and description for which she has been lauded, provided a diagnostic framework through which to view the great disruptions of the Bush era in continuity with the stage-managed spectacle of American politics that had preceded it. It was also very funny, especially in the chapters on Bob Woodward and Newt Gingrich, a quality that Didion’s critics and admirers both often underrate. It is astonishing to reflect that this weary, hilarious, incisive book was first published in America only a week after 9/11.
Loving a writer is often a matter of a fortuitous first encounter. I’m very glad this was mine. I think if I’d initially run into Didion via her famous early works, if some creative nonfiction class had tasked me with reading the deliberately mannered and self-consciously New-Journalistic essays of Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album—“all that princess-in-the-consulate bullshit,” a friend of mine, less of a fan than I am, once called it—then I would have been turned off and might never have returned. I would have found it precious and high-handed, and I would have found its best-known bits of self-reflective revelation, the “here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce” bits, calculated and artificial. I think I would have found her phony.
Instead, I read the essays in what amounted to reverse chronological order, and so my perspective on the output of the sixties and seventies was to see a working-out and expurgation of a lot of “fixed ideas,” to use one of Didion’s own titles, and the gradual development of a style of writing into what would become a style of thought. Didion is of course inextricably linked to the idea of a style. An interest in the merely superficial is something else for which she’s often been criticized—unfairly, I think. For all the recognizable stylistic consistency of her prose across the decades of her career, it takes an intentional lack of generosity to miss the evolution of her writing and of her thought. In the essay “In Bogotá,” for example, written in 1974 and collected in The White Album in 1979, she remembers her time in a place that had experienced the violent expression of America’s Monroe Doctrine as “mainly images, indelible but difficult to connect.” That essay contains barely a whisper of what would become, a decade later, in Salvador, a far more searching, searing examination of the brutal consequences of American influence and interference at the peripheries of its global empire.
