Joan Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Joan Didion has been on my radar for a while and while I’ve often learned of American modern culture through her eyes, I’d never really known very much about her until recently. I know she lived in California around the time of the Manson murders and is an author and journalist. I knew little else until I saw a fascinating documentary all about her life and career. Her marriage to writer, John Gregory Dunn, was not an easy one but they worked side by side and their marriage survived the ups and downs of their personal and professional heartbreaks.

Joan Didion has been on my radar for a while and while Her demeanour seemed always quiet, reserved and aloof, yet through her more personal writing she showed vulnerability especially when outlining failures, the feelings of her own shortcomings and so on, despite her hugely successful career.

She feels very deeply and writes to process her inner world and outer experience. She has fifty years under her belt as a journalist, author and playwright, starting with a job from college with Vogue which saw her move to New York in the footsteps of one of my other heroes, Sylvia Plath. So brave in her early twenties. I moved to London to teach and started writing at that time yet I took the safer road each time. She was fearless.

 Her work is often described as sentimental yet she feels she just processes what she sees and gives it to us raw. I love that. I would love to have her work ethic and ability to create the snapshots of life she does and has done at various times in American modern history without being more than a candid observer. 

As I’m sure you’re aware, my health gets in the way of my writing quite often but I’m always working on that. Joan has lived and worked with Multiple Sclerosis since the 1960s. Her health does not stop her creating her essays and stories. Her work ethic is quite incredible. In an interview back in 1968, she described her daily process:

“I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.”

She pursues the right word when she talks, physically searching for it and she is unapologetic in her pursuit of the most perfect. I love the obsession in her. With my health challenges, I can be wiped out for days at a time and even then, when I start writing again, I can only manage to write for short amounts of time. I am certainly chipping away at the first draft of my latest novel yet I’m aware this process will be more arduous this time around.

I pursue my writing with passion but with only a little of her assertion and so I aspire to be better. On tough days, this feels impossible, but writing a little each day keeps the flow. Much of my reading comes from powerful writers like Joan Didion. They inspire me to improve myself in terms of my words, my routine and managing my health more sensibly. She is an icon and her legacy speaks for itself.