12 JAN 06

12 JAN 06
Quintana Roo Dunne, John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion (Malibu, 1976)

Joan Didion is someone I read obsessively in my twenties and early thirties. I hadn't yet given up the idea of becoming a writer. I've never had a mentor, but her essays in particular had a strong teaching influence. They always stirred in me the desire to write and the weird belief that maybe I could, something akin to how listening to John Wesley Harding (the Dylan album) always makes me think I could write songs.

I approached The Year of Magical Thinking with caution. I'd been moved by what Steve Evans said about reading it--I felt a similar panic would arise in me. But I was already sad, sick too, when the book showed up in my mailbox.

"Do you always have to be right? He had said that." I identified, despite the big differences between our styles of living, with Didion's descriptions of her marriage ("we were each the person the other trusted")--& because I related so much to its round-the-clock togetherness, was especially struck by allusions to its difficulties and by what she seemed to feel, later, that she hadn't seen or seen to. (That old saw? Not in her hands.)

Certain scenes from the book keep coming back to me. For instance: she is under contract to begin a column for Life magazine. Life's idea for the first column is that she introduce herself, "let the readers know who you are." She plans to write it from Honolulu, where she and her husband and three-year-old daughter are when news of the My Lai massacre breaks. "It seemed to me that given this news I should write it from Saigon." It's a Sunday. She calls her editor, his wife says he will have to call her back.

"He's watching the NFL game," John said when I hung up. "He'll call you at halftime."
He did. He said that I should stay where I was and introduce myself, that as far as Saigon went "some of the guys are going out."

. . .

    I wrote the column letting the readers know who I was. It appeared. At the time it seemed an unexceptional enough eight hundred words in the assigned genre, but there was, at the end of the second paragraph, a line so out of synch with the entire Life mode of self-presentation that it might as well have suggested abduction by space aliens: "We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce." A week later we happened to be in New York. "Did you know she was writing it," many people asked John, sotto voce.
    Did he know I was writing it?
    He edited it.
    He took Quintana to the Honolulu Zoo so I could rewrite it.
    He drove me to the Western Union office in downtown Honolulu so I could file it.
    At the Western Union office he wrote REGARDS, DIDION at the end of it. That was what you always put at the end of a cable, he said. Why, I said. Because you do, he said.

--Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

. . . . . .

eod current
archives