Once I read The Year of Magical Thinking, I made it my goal to read all of Didion’s books; this in preparation or rather leading up to her latest endeavor, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, which features twelve never before collected pieces, that “offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.”
It is scheduled to be released January 26th.
The Year of Magical Thinking is a beautifully written exploration of the self, enveloped in grief.
While doing research for her latest, I googled her page and found a Vanity Fair article from 2016, “How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend.” In The Atlantic, a post from 2015, “The Elitist Allure of Joan Didion,” and finally, from the Inquirer. Net, a post from yesterday, January 15, “What did Joan Didion smell like in her 20s?”
Of course I clicked on it.
It led me to the last chapter in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “Goodbye to All That,” her instinctive yet enthralling ode to New York. “For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day.”
Slouching Towards Bethlehem was published in 1968 and both are still available; the former launched in 1933, the latter, 1948.
The title comes from the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, and “conveys the complexity and the ‘atomization’ of the hippie scene not as the latest fashionable fad, but as a serious advanced stage of society in which things are truly “falling apart.””
Didion is always relevant.
I didn’t know Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Didion’s first collection of non-fiction writing; at the time there were questions whether this type of writing was acceptable other than “mere journalism,” but in reality, it is a “rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.”
In Dan Wakefield’s review from the New York Times at the time of its publication, “… in her portraits of people, Ms. Didion is not out to expose but to understand and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed bridges and naïve acid trippers, left wing idealogues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamourous but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful in the midst of their lives’ debris.”
Divided into 3 sections, Lifestyles in the Golden Land, Personals, and Seven Places of the Mind; it doesn’t matter what she writes, her personality comes through in such a self-effacing way, as if speaking with a friend. Her prose can meander without losing the reader, then lead you right to a Kleenex.
And you don’t know how you got there.
“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.”
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