By Stacey May Fowles, Postmedia News
Any discussion about Joan Didion must reference her influence, something that the author herself is not entirely comfortable with. Yet given the ecstatic reaction to her recent visit to Toronto, it would not be extreme to suggest she has disciples, recruited both because of what she notices and what she leaves out. During an almost half-century career in novels, essays and journalism, she has consistently excavated the details in life -- both public and private -- that are saturated with meaning, presenting them to us unadorned. Direct and dispassionate, her sentences are stripped down to blinding clarity, and as the last decade delivered personal tragedies that so viciously and suddenly altered her life, she used that clarity to examine our worst fears around the loss of those we love. This propelled her into a kind of literary sainthood, and the appointment as an authority on grief seems difficult for her to entirely come to terms with.
When we shake hands in the doorway of her hotel room, her demeanour is welcoming, light and pleasant. The frequent commentary that she looks worn, or that she is wearing her grief on her face, is rendered false. Her neck and shoulders wrapped in a wide lavender scarf, she is concerned with how cold the room is and fusses with the thermostat, an American who laughs at her own momentary confusion between Celsius and Fahrenheit. It occurs to me that the observation of her frailty has been made too many times, both in youth and age, as if it was impossible that something so powerful could come from someone so slight. Being in her presence does, however, deliver that promised power, a sort of suspicious calm.
We immediately visit the trials and exhaustion of the book tour, a part of the process Didion fails to enjoy. She concedes it's a necessity of momentum to stave off an inner fear of failure, both in her work and in her recovery from grief. Private and introverted, Didion craves solitude and eschews the spotlight. "Somebody recognized me in the Boston airport this morning," she tells me, genuinely surprised. When I ask her about her feelings around so many writers and readers looking to her as a touchstone, she provides a historical example of her reluctance to lead.
"I didn't like teaching. I actively disliked it. I simply never felt that I was being useful," she says. "I was so scared when I stood up in front of the class, scared to speak."
Didion wrote her first story at the age of five and trained herself to write by typing out the passages from her favourite books, namely Hemingway's, on an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter. When she was a senior at Berkeley, she won a writing contest that got her a successful interview at Vogue in New York. This training in magazines is partly responsible for her prose style; there are near-mythic tales of her ability to write to a specific word count to fill spaces left by unreliable writers. While largely famous for these essays, she views them as mere necessity of her employment.
"When I was in my 20s, I wrote a lot of personal pieces kind of by accident. We would sometimes assign a piece and put it on the cover and the piece hadn't come in. So I would write the piece. They hit a chord with a lot of people."
Hitting a chord is an understatement; they became the kinds of essays young women would cling to as they came into their own, sections quoted, tattooed and shared as evidence of solidarity of feeling. "Finally, I had to stop doing it because I was developing a horrible sense of myself as Miss Lonelyhearts. So I didn't write personal anymore. Magical Thinking was the first time I went back to that."
The Year of Magical Thinking documented her relationship with John Gregory Dunne, a writer whom she met during her time at Vogue and who for four decades was her partner in both life and art. Dunne died suddenly of a heart attack as they sat down to dinner one evening in 2003, an event that dramatically altered not only Didion's life, but how we came to know her as a great American writer. The detached observer turned the focus back on herself, intimately revealing her process with profound loss, and catapulting her into a household literary stardom far beyond her mid-career reportage of events. Hundreds of thousands of readers read Didion's prose as relief; this was not the glossed melodrama of televised bereavement, but rather an intimate record of the crippling banality of the process. Magical Thinking provided the vacant spaces we must travel through to find closure, those spaces so much more suffocating in their insignificance. Didion tells me how it was received as a revelation; it's not a book about someone who died, but rather a book about a marriage, idealized. "That was what they were looking for and that was what they found. It was so unexpected."
Magical Thinking also tracked the then progressing illness of John and Joan's adopted daughter Quintana Roo Didion Dunne, who, at the end of 2003, developed a flu that eventually became pneumonia. This led to an inexplicable series of hospitalizations, endured both before and after the loss of Dunne, and ultimately culminating in Quintana's death, almost two years later, at the age of 39. Blue Nights is the first time Didion has written about Quintana and is Magical Thinking's more visceral companion, as different a book as the loss of a child would suggest. It has no fixed timeline, and instead is a series of jarring, sporadic reflections. "It just kind of dropped into this dialogue with myself," she explains. Originally approaching the project as a broadly researched non-fiction book about children, it transformed into something else entirely. "It's about there not being any possible upside. We tend to think there's an upside in everything."
Blue Nights possesses a vulnerability that belies Didion's previous impenetrable tone, suggesting that her greatest achievement in letters is actually being unlike herself for 200 masterful, heartbreaking pages. We see a refreshingly authentic portrait of motherhood, from the indecipherable and overwhelming desire to have a child, to the constant doubt of one's ability to parent. "I didn't have a clue how to be a mother," she tells me. "Every time I got to the point where I thought I did, something would surprise me. Quintana was always out-thinking me. She knew what she was doing."
Didion's punishing obsession with her perceived failures with Quintana -- her helplessness to assist with her alcohol abuse and mental illness, her distance and absence, even her inability to truly "know" her child -- is actually something she has been unconsciously examining throughout her career.
"Several of my novels are about being afraid she will grow up and leave me," she says. "I didn't recognize that while I was writing them, but I did recognize it afterwards." At one point in our discussion I ask her about her concerns that she infantilized and treated her daughter like a doll, and she immediately asks if I've seen the back cover of the book. When I pull it from my bag she gestures to the photograph and says emphatically, "That's a doll." The striking black and white image of Quintana as a child, pouting sternly with her head in her hands, sits between us on the coffee table, a reminder for the remainder of the interview.
It is apt that Blue Nights is a book littered with questions never answered -- it realizes that any conciliatory response to the death of a child is apt to be false, if not offensive, and instead leaves readers with the unease of a relentless staccato interrogation. 'I had to process what happened to Quintana. Considering it was the one thing on my mind, I managed to avoid it for a long while. It was difficult in every possible way because it was unlike anything I had ever written. Most things that I had written had a narrative. This had no narrative. I just kind of plunged in, and plunged in, and plunged in again. It was like drowning."
Blue Nights is also very much a reflection on the mental and physical deterioration of an aging writer. Those passages that cycle furiously through Didion's own fears about her loss of ability are the most terrifying for the disciples, and indeed the most powerful. When I ask Didion, now 76, about the writing process becoming more difficult for her with age, she is unsure. "I say it's getting more difficult because I'm getting older and don't have the concentration I used to have. Some people point out that I've been complaining about this my entire adult life." She notes that the way her days are now structured makes writing difficult, with too many people doing things for her and not enough time for herself.
"It is difficult to lead that public life," she tells me. What she does enjoy, however, is meeting readers one on one, an interaction that in recent years has become largely about their stories of grief and her participation in their solace. "That's great because it's their story. Not my story," she says. Now an unwitting expert on loss, she believes we have surrendered death to professionals and therefore no longer deal with grieving well, that we change the subject when it's front of mind, that we don't use the word mourning anymore when we should, that grief changes you and it's vital to examine that rather than rush to return to normal.
"You do have a new definition of yourself, necessarily, because you tend to see yourself through someone who is very close to you. When you see yourself through someone else's eyes, time doesn't pass. I didn't get older ever when John was alive. He saw me as how old I was when he married me."
After so much has been taken from her, I ask Didion if she has an impulse to hide from it for a time, to hibernate, to look away from it all if only to rest. But the painful things in life are her preoccupation, her written examination of them a necessity of survival.
"If I don't stare them down they get me. The instinct is always to look at them."
original source:
http://www.canada.com/entertainment/Joan+Didion+staring+down+pain/5698137/story.html
