Finally introduced myself to Joan Didion. This book is a collection of essays written between 1965-7, primarily taking place all over the West Coast, including a reminiscence of her childhood in Sacramento, following John Wayne to a movie set in Mexico, an in depth look at the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Fran, an essay on self-respect and more. I might have glazed over one or two of the twenty collected essays, but for the most part I was quite captivated in subjects I didn't think I held much interest in.
The title of the collection (and my favorite essay of the bunch) comes from a Yeats poem, quoted in the epigraph. I was almost turned off there since Romantic poetry ain't my jam, but I kept an open-mind. But the first essay, describing the trial of a husband's alleged murder by his wife, gripped me from the start. Didion was quite enmeshed in the West Coast culture; she understands it on a more personal level than Thompson's drug-punctured mind, though their comparison may only be apt in regards to the Haight-Asbury essay. In 'Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,' Didion talks about the appeal of the West, how in 60s (and probably still today) it still holds the illusion of frontier. "The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past."
Other out of context yet aphoristic lines that shimmer like gold as I, the reader, pan through her prose like a 49er:
"...the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live."
"But Durango. The very name hallucinates."
"The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself."
"Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question."
"Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older."
On fiction vs. non-:
"...not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters."
And more proof that any online thinkpiece you read about the "death of the novel" is bullshit:
"Right now he is talking about Marshall McLuhan and how the printed word is finished, out, over." (written in 1967)
If there's one thing I want to hate Joan Didion for, it's for spreading the secret that only those of us that wield language as our weapon formerly knew. "Writers are always selling somebody out." It seems like one of those romantic and generalized notions of writing that I read all too often on pretentious twitter accounts, but I can't say I'd want to read a story where nobody got hurt.
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