Joan Didion Doesn't Owe the World Anything
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Joan Didion confessed in 1976. “What I want and what I fear.” The writer was in one way taking preemptive credit—or, depending on your point of view, accepting the preemptive blame—for the explosion of personal essay-writing that, fueled by the internet and its egotisms, would later become known as the first-person industrial complex. Didion, with her faith in the moral worth of introspection—her conviction that understanding oneself operates on a continuum with the understanding of everything else—helped to inspire a generation of writers to remain, via acts of performative journaling, on nodding terms with the people they used to be.
Didion’s writing, however, can be deceptive: It pulses with the heady warmth of confession, but in fact has extremely little patience for the indignities of aimless admission. Didion’s confessions are controlled, always, and extremely strategic about what they share and what they keep hidden from view. More than admitting, they imply—Montaigne, definitely, but also Monet: Didion is an essayist who is also an impressionist. The words smear and splash and streak and, through precision and—you have to assume—a bit of, “I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. … Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there.”)
