joooaaaan jooooaaan jooooaaaan
This Week in Reading
The White Album by Joan Didion
About once a month I google “Joan Didion” just to make sure she hasn’t died.
I write a lot these days, and am a much better writer than I was two years ago, or even six months ago, but sometimes I read something that reminds me just how far I am from being the writer that I want to be. Joan Didion is everything I want to be as a writer.
Joan Didion wrote about California and then I moved here. That is perhaps not the whole truth, but it is at least part of it. Joan Didion can make you love things that you never really considered before. (“The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way”) The White Album made me love Georgia O’Keefe (“At twenty-four she left all those opinions behind her and went for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her how not to paint them”), made me love Honolulu (“I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do”), made me love shopping centers (“I wanted to build them because I had fallen into the habit of writing fiction, and I had it in my head that a couple of good centers might support this habit less taxingly than a pale blue office at Vogue”).
Joan Didion is such a masterful writer. Her writing is so casual, yet piercing. She leads you from topic to topic effortlessly, jutting from personal anecdote to a tangential aside, to cutting cultural criticism. Sometimes I pause and wonder how we got to a particular idea, but it never feels abrupt or confusing. It reminds me of when you are having a really good conversation with a friend and say “but going back to the original point” and then laugh because you realize the original point was 2 hours and 30 topics in the past and neither of you noticed. There is so much movement in her essays; Joan Didion steers her readers through the text. She is both an excellent dance partner and the entire symphony, and I am letting her walk me backwards into the next sentence.
She includes just enough detail to give her writing specificity, but not enough to bog you down. Everything she writes feels so conversational, so off hand, and then she’ll yank the rug out from under you-- hit you with something unexpected and brilliant and startling.
I have never been a particularly technically proficient artist. (In one infamous incident, my favorite professor held a lopsided circle I had cut from a sheet of brass up to the class and proceeded to go on a ten minute rant about how our program didn’t value craftsmanship.) In part due to that professor, I hold myself to high standards, but I do so only because I make myself, not because I derive any joy from the craft.
I tell people that I am an artist that hates making art and I’m not joking. I love the moment before I start making art, the sudden high of a new idea, the two or three minutes when a concept and image and idea crash into my brain and in one fell swoop I know exactly what I am going to make and why. And I love the end of a project, when I have an object that matches my initial vision. I love the satisfaction of completion and I love the half hour or so it takes me to draft a single perfect paragraph of wall text. Everything in the middle, the puttering and laboring and gluing and taping off and fiddling is just a slog, steps I must complete to carry me between the two points of my art practice I do enjoy. I know it sounds like it’s not worth it but I assure you it is. I would fuss and work for a hundred hours just for the 35 minutes of conception and reflection. Those moments are good enough to keep me making art for the rest of my life. But I have never enjoyed craft for the sake of the craft. I am not someone who is exploring a medium, is pushing the boundaries of painting, is drawn to the studio by the feel of wet clay or the satisfaction of dragging a piece of charcoal across paper.
But with writing I revel in craftsmanship in a way I never have with art. I spend a lot of time thinking about the shape of a sentence, how to create emphasis and rhythm and form. I like moving words around, shuffling sentences into different orders. (A second confession: if I make art just so I can write an artist statement, I only write an artist statement so that I can edit it.) I like reading things by better writers and trying to dissect how they’ve done it. I am like an illusionist at a magic show, looking for the false bottom of a box, the mirror behind the door. The White Album is a magic trick I can’t quite crack.
I’m obsessed with Didion’s ability to write an ending without writing a conclusion. “Yet flying back across the Pacific I regretted only the toaster.” What a wild and brave way to end an essay! Who DOES that? (Joan Didion does that). I have had many conversations about how the best artists are the ones that don’t doubt themselves. The ones that don’t consider their audience because audience reception is entirely beside the point. They make, because it never occurred to them not to, and the end product glows with a type of purity that is impossible to look away from. Joan Didion doesn’t worry if she is veering off topic. Joan Didion doesn’t wonder if she has come to an adequate conclusion.
I like what Joan Didion has to say, but mainly I just like the way she says it. It gives me comfort to know that there are more Joan Didion books that I have yet to pick up, that she is still out there, at age 83, writing things for me to read.
Further Reading
It is always a good time to get into Joan Didion. I would strongly recommend starting with Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but The White Album would probably be a good second foray. Blue Nights is incredible but it is very sad and she wrote it much later in her career, so maybe read it later.