Lorraine Cook/THE REVIEW
Joan Didion’s iconic essays continue to influence new generations of writers.
BY
ASSISTANT MOSAIC EDITOR
To this day, Joan Didion remains hidden. Her work runs the gamut from fiction to nonfiction, but her most recognized pieces are the personal essays that rose to prominence in the ’60s and ’70s, namely the collections “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album.”
Twenty-something millennials are drawn to her essays like moths to flame, but they are often misinterpreted. We take for granted the precision of her writing—the acuity with which she takes in the world around her and lays it expertly on the page. The construction of her sentences, down to the minutiae of her punctuation, cement her work within a delicate shell—simultaneously accessible and impenetrable.
She deconstructs large-scale events and prominent figures, allowing the reader to see what each looks like under scrutiny. Didion infuses mundane items and experiences with clarity and meaning, making each a lens with which to view the wider world. Her clearest example of this is the 1977 essay “Holy Water,” which examines Didion’s lifelong interest in the filtering of water throughout drought-ridden California. The depth and scope of her work takes root in simplicity, but it reveals far more than her essays can encompass.
Though many in our generation look to Didion’s work as a prime example for their own personal essays, they overwhelmingly tend to overexaggerate the “self.” There has been a recent trend in “bleeding wound” essays in which young writers will attempt social commentary on large issues with themselves and their experiences at the center. Many observing this trend point out that we look to Didion as our guide, though that is not at all what her work succeeded in doing.
These writers will reveal their personal struggles in ways that make a reader feel heartbreak, but do little to bring that reader into the position of fellow observer. While Didion is conscious of her presence in each essay, making the reader cognizant of it as well, we feel assured and slightly comforted knowing she’s there. She’ll show us truth.
She writes in the beginning of “The White Album”—“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…we live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘idea’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
Didion’s essays do not offer clean endings. Her work reflects the uncertainty of the world around her, and the reader bears witness as she examines each element with a scientist’s precision.
She does not offer personal sentiment. She offers us experience and wonder and confusion, all of which we come to understand as an observer standing right beside her.
This piece is a perfect example of the over-writing which Joan Didion avoids.
‘A prime example for their own personal essays’
Too many words, not enough thought. The author ‘overexagerates the self’.
Juvenile. Must improve.