Joan Didion: A Tribute Which Will Read as Parody (Because I'm No Joan Didion)

This afternoon I attended the Joan Didion talk at the Los Angeles Times Book Fair.  A friend and I waited in a long line.  It snaked from the entrance to Royce Hall around one building and half of another.  When it finally crept forward we were greeted by a large security guard who could have been an extra in a film about a corrupt Los Angeles police force.  Or New York.  I made a list of things I would observe.

I would observe: the capacity of Royce Hall.  I would observe: the characteristics of the audience.  I would observe: Didion's hands as she spoke about the death of her husband.

In two minutes Didion would take the stage.  Almost all of the 1,834 seats had been filled but people still shuffled in.  Royce Hall had been modeled after the San Ambrogio Church in Milan.  Construction on San Ambrogio began in the 4th century.  A south tower was added in the 9th.  A north in the 12th.  The 12th century oversaw a interior remodeling in the popular Romanesque style.  The rolling terrain of the young UCLA campus suggested northern Italy to the architects.  Three years later they had completed their Romanesque basilica.  Of the Westwood campus' original four buildings it is the only one which stands unrenovated. 

In the 15th Century Cardinal Ascanio Sforza ordered Bramante to add cloisters to the church.  Sforza belonged to the ruling family of Milan.  Its founder is rumored to have bent metal bars with his hands.  Ascanio wanted to create what the 19th century American philosopher Josiah Royce would call "a community of hope."  The community would be "constituted by the fact that each of its members accepts, as part of his own individual life and self, the same expected future events that each of his fellows accepts."  The UCLA Fellows agreed with Royce and named a building after him.

The building was filled to near capacity.  In the audience were many older Californians, fans of her work in the '60s and '70s and naturally sympathetic to the lose of a spouse or a child.   They too would have lost someone, or soon will.  There were also many younger women finding seats, asking men who had rolled joints in Berkeley in the '60s if they could squeeze by.  Her long blonde hair brushed his arm as she passed and you knew from his face he didn't mind.  He could imagine her in an iconic yellow bikini as the Vietnam War raged.  He could remember when he read in 1979 that Didion was not "the society in microcosm [but] a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old-fashioned bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come."  You could almost see him sniff the air in her wake.

That these young woman came to hear Didion speak initially surprised many.  When Didion took to the stage she related how The Year of Magical Thinking had found her a new audience.  "People would come up and speak to me in the airport now," she said.  "They were younger than I expected, more interested in my marriage than his death."  As she said this none of the young women present looked embarassed or disturbed.  None of them shifted in their seats at her statement.  None of them were more interested in Didion's marriage than her loss.  "We are not allowed to dwell on death," she said.  Some of them did.

During the Question & Answer segment one stepped to the microphone.  "I was friends with Quintana Roo in high school.  She was a beautiful person.  Will you write a book about that too?"  "I hadn't thought about that," Didion lied.  When asked by the New York Times whether she would change The Year of Magical Thinking to reflect her daughter's death, she had said "It's finished."  Her lie seemed more a product of surprise than deliberation.  She had not expected to see a young woman, one Quintana may have brought home one day, one who if she thought long enough she could remember, or imagine she remembered, streaking through the kitchen to inform her daughter of some urgent triviality.  She said "I hadn't thought about that."

Of her craft and life she said "I stopped caring about hiding things.  My style is about withholding information.  Or it was.  Now I wanted to be direct."  When a woman in the Q & A informed her that "I have a severe learning disability, I can barely read, but I love your books," she smiled kindly and said "It must be the very large typeface.  They want me to write in a very large typeface."  Unless the typeface is unusual publishers will not inform their patrons of its name.  Play It As It Lays is "Designed by Guy Fleming."  "Book design by Iris Weinstein" graces the copyright page of Political Fictions.  On back cover you find "Author photograph © Quintana Roo."

The death of her daughter will figure more prominently in the stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking.  Despite being known "as a journalist, playwright, essayist, and novelist," this is "the first stage play I've written."  She has collaborated with her late husband on numerous screenplays, but this is different.  "There is no investment," she says of writing screenplays, "because you know someone else will come and ruin it."  The only screenplay she still likes and could, but never will, re-read is for Ice Queen.  It was never filmed.  The Year of Magical Thinking will be a one-woman monologue.  She hopes, but doubts,  it will find an audience. 

"I never even go to the theater." 

Comments

[Jamie]

Beautifully put Scott. A writer foundational in the structure of nonfiction prose, a woman in which to model oneself after, and a person whose loses reflect or precede our own. Didion will always have an audience.