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4.12 AVERAGE
4.12 AVERAGE
I wanted to be a 5-star Didion gal, but sometimes life just doesn't work out that way... there are beyond a doubt some 5-star essays in here, and it's bookended by the two very best in my opinion! The ones that weren't didn't land with me because they were either filled with pop culture references too lost on me to frame any connection, or (I'm sorry) too navel-gazey. Joan's got opinions, we love an essay colored by personal experience, but to me some pieces still read narrow rather than expansive, which is at odds with how I wanted to experience the little worlds she explored.
5 stars in my heart Joan, you're one of the good ones.
5 stars in my heart Joan, you're one of the good ones.
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
informative
medium-paced
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Ending with “Goodbye to All That” was really saving the best for last. I read it aloud to Jackson because he’s sick and in need of screenless entertainment, and because it was the last essay in the book and because it was the first sample I’d ever read of Joan’s writing and because Phoebe Bridgers has quoted it personally and via boygenius lyrics: “was anyone ever so young?” I remember reading that in my early twenties kind of getting it, but now reading it at 29 and if I told you about the things I said, did, thought between ages 20-24, you really would say, no way, was anyone ever really that young and ridiculous? And I’d say, like Joan, I’m here to tell you that yes, they were.
We both connected with this essay in different ways. Jack said he felt validated because although he’s never been to New York, he has sensed that it would be like a fair the way Joan described and that it is overrated and not meant for living long term or for ordinary folks. I connected to the realization that we have a finite number of afternoons and that maybe nowhere I live will ever feel like where I am from. We both were reminded of Frances Ha and Lady Bird and Greta Gerwig lore with the growing up in Sacramento and moving to NYC as a young adult, and it not being maybe everything it was sold as.
As for the book as a whole, it was a collection of essays so I started adding notes as I went along, so I don’t know if I have much to say about it as a collection. As a whole, it did make me miss California and wonder if I would have turned out more like Joan if I had never moved away myself. But that’s probably just California dreamin’.
We both connected with this essay in different ways. Jack said he felt validated because although he’s never been to New York, he has sensed that it would be like a fair the way Joan described and that it is overrated and not meant for living long term or for ordinary folks. I connected to the realization that we have a finite number of afternoons and that maybe nowhere I live will ever feel like where I am from. We both were reminded of Frances Ha and Lady Bird and Greta Gerwig lore with the growing up in Sacramento and moving to NYC as a young adult, and it not being maybe everything it was sold as.
As for the book as a whole, it was a collection of essays so I started adding notes as I went along, so I don’t know if I have much to say about it as a collection. As a whole, it did make me miss California and wonder if I would have turned out more like Joan if I had never moved away myself. But that’s probably just California dreamin’.
reflective
sad
emotional
funny
reflective
slow-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I bought this book at a little bookstore in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco because, even though I told myself at the beginning of the year that I wouldn’t buy any new books in the hopes that I'll read some of the unread books on my bookshelf, I needed something new to read while I was away and this one has been on my list for awhile. I didn’t know much about it, other than knowing it was a collection of nonfiction essays and that it was some of Didion’s earlier work. As it turns out, the essays detail various aspects of life in the late 60s and the title essay is a piece "which derived from some time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco,” and it was for Didion "both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed.” A small serendipitous coincidence to randomly desire to purchase a book during my first trip to the Haight that would end up showing me a bit about how that neighborhood had made a name for itself in the first place.
Some of the essays I loved, and some of them I didn’t really care for at all. As I read through the book I felt frustrated that I didn’t understand a lot of the cultural references. There were some essays that I would read a whole page of before realizing that my mind was somewhere else and I needed to begin again. I also noticed that she has a lengthy (although not unpleasant) way of constructing her sentences. There was one particular sentence, and I wish I had marked it so that I could cite it as an example here, that I read over and over to try to decipher her phrasing. Not because it didn’t make sense, but because it was constructed passively, was deliberately longer than it needed to be, and I wanted to understand why she was making those choices. This is a minor example of something that took me not only finishing the book, but then later revisiting specific passages to understand.
I’ve started marking the pages of the books that I read when I come across something that gets me. I only mention this because my new dog-earing habit is what led me to understand her choices. When I went back to my marked pages to re-read the sentence or two that got me, I realized that it wasn’t just a few sentences that were smart or insightful or honest or funny, it was whole paragraphs, sometimes whole pages. She doesn’t make a point by telling you her point. She makes a point by illustrating it for you, by hinting at an idea or a concept, and then painting a picture with words, and then revealing more of the idea, until finally you’re reading about something that seems so far removed from where you started that all you can do is say, wow, and then mark the page for closer inspection later.
An example: in an essay on Howard Hughes, she relays a story she heard about why Hughes likes Las Vegas: “because he likes to be able to find a restaurant open in case he wants a sandwich." She questions why we like these stories, why we make a folk hero of a man who is the anthesis of all our official heroes, why we even concern ourselves with a man who is known as a giant, difficult weirdo. (She doesn’t call him a giant, difficult weirdo, by the way—she illustrates the point so that you arrive at the conclusion yourself.) So here comes some commentary on celebrity culture, I think to myself. And then: "It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules. Of course, we do not admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another. A long time ago, Lionel Trilling pointed out what he called “the fatal separation” between “the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination.” “I mean only,” he wrote, “that our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning, and international cooperation. . . . Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.” … There has always been a divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” Um, excuse me, wow? She starts with a story of a strange business tycoon’s 24/7 need for a possible sandwich, and suddenly we’re exploring the difference between what it means to feel something innately within us vs the mask we present to the world. And she doesn’t say all of this in a way that feels sad! She isn’t suggesting that the mask is unnecessary, that our official heroes aren’t important, that the people we marry aren’t chosen for good reason—just that there can sometimes be a vast difference between the things we believe about how the world works and the things that we hold dear within us, that the stories we hear about those of us who conduct our lives without a mask intrigue us because, deep down, the nomad, maskless version of ourselves is the one we know and love the best. What a neat, interesting journey to be taken on.
It feels like the kind of writing that I never get the opportunity to read. (Not since my college days, at least, when close reading and literary criticism were near daily occurrences.) And I think I had a hard time with it at first because I’m so used to reading Jezebel articles and Huffington Post lists where everything is said simply, and you know exactly what to think (or not think) at the end. But Joan doesn’t write like that. She doesn’t write the sentence in active voice because she doesn't care about making her writing sound more succinct. She doesn’t just come out and tell you that she saw a John Wayne movie for the first time with her brother when she was eight years old. Instead, she takes the long way around. Instead, she describes what it felt like to be eight and see John Wayne for the first time, she describes what it feels like for that eight year old to now be an adult, she makes you feel what it was like. And then she talks about what all of those things might mean. She’s not writing to tell you what to think. She’s writing to tell you how she feels, and how you might want to feel too if you think hard enough about it. She’s in it for the long game, in other words.
Even though there were some essays that I loved, as I read through the book it felt like a three-star experience overall. It wasn’t until after I was done, until after I started writing this, that I developed a deeper appreciation for her writing. As I wrote this, I kept opening the book up in random places and getting lost in what she was saying, and was almost even more interested to read her thoughts out of context than I was when I was reading the book straight through, when I was trying to take in the book the same way I take in long form articles on the internet.
Plus, I like her. I like her mind, and I like the way she feels about things. Even if I didn’t always get it, she did a really good job of helping me feel it. And that counts for a lot with me.
Some other quotes I liked:
Introduction
I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
On John Wayne
There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar. The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies. We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut, which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” As it happened, I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is the line I wait to hear. I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.
On Keeping a Notebook
I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $1,000 a month. “Someday you will,” she said lazily. “Someday it all comes.” There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorcing her husband. “He left me no choice,” she said over and over as she punched the register. “He has a little seven-month-old baby by her, he left me no choice.” I would like to believe that my dread then was for the human condition, but of course it was for me, because I wanted a baby and did not then have one and because I wanted to own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover. It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
On Self-Respect
People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please other an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.
Goodbye to All That - NYC
Sometime later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the upper East Side that went, “but where is the school-girl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.
I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank Bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
Some of the essays I loved, and some of them I didn’t really care for at all. As I read through the book I felt frustrated that I didn’t understand a lot of the cultural references. There were some essays that I would read a whole page of before realizing that my mind was somewhere else and I needed to begin again. I also noticed that she has a lengthy (although not unpleasant) way of constructing her sentences. There was one particular sentence, and I wish I had marked it so that I could cite it as an example here, that I read over and over to try to decipher her phrasing. Not because it didn’t make sense, but because it was constructed passively, was deliberately longer than it needed to be, and I wanted to understand why she was making those choices. This is a minor example of something that took me not only finishing the book, but then later revisiting specific passages to understand.
I’ve started marking the pages of the books that I read when I come across something that gets me. I only mention this because my new dog-earing habit is what led me to understand her choices. When I went back to my marked pages to re-read the sentence or two that got me, I realized that it wasn’t just a few sentences that were smart or insightful or honest or funny, it was whole paragraphs, sometimes whole pages. She doesn’t make a point by telling you her point. She makes a point by illustrating it for you, by hinting at an idea or a concept, and then painting a picture with words, and then revealing more of the idea, until finally you’re reading about something that seems so far removed from where you started that all you can do is say, wow, and then mark the page for closer inspection later.
An example: in an essay on Howard Hughes, she relays a story she heard about why Hughes likes Las Vegas: “because he likes to be able to find a restaurant open in case he wants a sandwich." She questions why we like these stories, why we make a folk hero of a man who is the anthesis of all our official heroes, why we even concern ourselves with a man who is known as a giant, difficult weirdo. (She doesn’t call him a giant, difficult weirdo, by the way—she illustrates the point so that you arrive at the conclusion yourself.) So here comes some commentary on celebrity culture, I think to myself. And then: "It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules. Of course, we do not admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another. A long time ago, Lionel Trilling pointed out what he called “the fatal separation” between “the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination.” “I mean only,” he wrote, “that our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning, and international cooperation. . . . Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.” … There has always been a divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” Um, excuse me, wow? She starts with a story of a strange business tycoon’s 24/7 need for a possible sandwich, and suddenly we’re exploring the difference between what it means to feel something innately within us vs the mask we present to the world. And she doesn’t say all of this in a way that feels sad! She isn’t suggesting that the mask is unnecessary, that our official heroes aren’t important, that the people we marry aren’t chosen for good reason—just that there can sometimes be a vast difference between the things we believe about how the world works and the things that we hold dear within us, that the stories we hear about those of us who conduct our lives without a mask intrigue us because, deep down, the nomad, maskless version of ourselves is the one we know and love the best. What a neat, interesting journey to be taken on.
It feels like the kind of writing that I never get the opportunity to read. (Not since my college days, at least, when close reading and literary criticism were near daily occurrences.) And I think I had a hard time with it at first because I’m so used to reading Jezebel articles and Huffington Post lists where everything is said simply, and you know exactly what to think (or not think) at the end. But Joan doesn’t write like that. She doesn’t write the sentence in active voice because she doesn't care about making her writing sound more succinct. She doesn’t just come out and tell you that she saw a John Wayne movie for the first time with her brother when she was eight years old. Instead, she takes the long way around. Instead, she describes what it felt like to be eight and see John Wayne for the first time, she describes what it feels like for that eight year old to now be an adult, she makes you feel what it was like. And then she talks about what all of those things might mean. She’s not writing to tell you what to think. She’s writing to tell you how she feels, and how you might want to feel too if you think hard enough about it. She’s in it for the long game, in other words.
Even though there were some essays that I loved, as I read through the book it felt like a three-star experience overall. It wasn’t until after I was done, until after I started writing this, that I developed a deeper appreciation for her writing. As I wrote this, I kept opening the book up in random places and getting lost in what she was saying, and was almost even more interested to read her thoughts out of context than I was when I was reading the book straight through, when I was trying to take in the book the same way I take in long form articles on the internet.
Plus, I like her. I like her mind, and I like the way she feels about things. Even if I didn’t always get it, she did a really good job of helping me feel it. And that counts for a lot with me.
Some other quotes I liked:
Introduction
I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
On John Wayne
There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar. The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies. We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut, which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” As it happened, I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is the line I wait to hear. I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.
On Keeping a Notebook
I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $1,000 a month. “Someday you will,” she said lazily. “Someday it all comes.” There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorcing her husband. “He left me no choice,” she said over and over as she punched the register. “He has a little seven-month-old baby by her, he left me no choice.” I would like to believe that my dread then was for the human condition, but of course it was for me, because I wanted a baby and did not then have one and because I wanted to own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover. It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
On Self-Respect
People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please other an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.
Goodbye to All That - NYC
Sometime later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the upper East Side that went, “but where is the school-girl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.
I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank Bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.