Yesterday, I had the tremendous pleasure of being a guest at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, TX. The weather has been ridiculously good in Texas in December, and somehow I got to enjoy 75 degree weather on December 23rd at an amazing place. I’d never had the opportunity of being on-property at Shady Oaks, and once I was there, I didn’t want to leave. To call it special is an understatement. The golf course is spectacular, but the vibe and feel of the clubhouse and men’s room is even better. I could have spent all day there without even stepping foot on the golf course and still had a memorable time. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Shady was the home of Ben Hogan, and seeing the spot where he hit balls and the table where he ate his meals was the cherry on top of an incredible day. Unfortunately, when I was somewhere around hole 6, I got the following text from a close friend:
“Joan Didion died.”
My response was equally terse:
“Damnit.”
I can’t pinpoint when exactly I really got into reading, and I’m not one of those people who can point to a specific book and say, “That’s the book that made me love literature.” So I’m not going to lie and say Joan Didion is the reason I read or the reason I’m an English professor, because I don’t think that’s true. I can say, though, that when I think back to the time in my life in which I first started to realize that I wanted my professional life to somehow involve reading and talking about texts, I know that my first encounter with Joan Didion was in that same window of time.
The first Joan Didion text I read was The Year of Magical Thinking, which might be her most famous work, even though it came in the fifth decade of her marvelous career. Again, I can’t point to a specific memory I have from my reading of that heartbreaking book, but I do know that it wasn’t long after when I began to get my hands on more Didion. It didn’t take me long to develop a deep fascination with everything about her, and while I didn’t immediately read her entire catalogue, she did immediately find a foothold in my English major brain. From that point on, Joan Didion never really left my readerly self. In particular, her seminal essay, “The White Album,” has played a central role in my reading and teaching life for the past decade. I include the opening paragraph from that essay in every syllabus I make, and I try to spend at least one day talking about it in most classes I teach.
The title of the essay comes from the famous Beatles album in 1968, known for its weird, fragmented, all-over-the-place mix of songs. Didion’s essay works in a similar fashion. Written over a 10-year period from 1968-78, “The White Album” jumps all over the place in time and space. In one section she’s talking about a Doors recording session; in another, she recounts a visit to Huey P. Newton in a county jail; and in still another, she includes a packing list. It’s an essay that defies description, because it does so many different things, but somehow it also finds a way to clearly communicate its main message. The product of 10 years of observations and conversations, “The White Album” is Joan Didion trying to make sense of the world and her life in it. This, of course, is best summed up in her famous opening line:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Although not quoted or put on posters as much as “The Road Not Taken,” Didion’s line might give Frost’s poem a run for its money in a “most misunderstood and misused literary quote” competition. On first read, it seems as if Didion is saying that, through stories, we find meaning in life. This is a comforting thought, especially for people like me who spend so much time inhabiting stories. If you read past the first line, though, the entire essay gives a different message. Stories do help us live, but not in the Hallmark-card-y way implied by the opening line. Stories help us live because, well, they are the only way we have to make sense of things that don’t make sense. Without stories, the pieces of the puzzle don’t match up; the causes don’t connect with effects; a doesn’t lead to b, and b doesn’t lead to c. In other words, everything is random and nothing means anything until we apply the lens of story. Without this, it’s all nothing. But there’s a catch: Didion is not saying everything makes sense. What she is saying, though, is that the epitome of the human experience is to try and make sense of things even though we know they often won’t make any. If you read the entirety of “The White Album,” I don’t see how it’s possible to come to a conclusion different than that.
On one hand, this is a sad message for an essay often considered one of the most important in the past 100 years of American writing. Saying things don’t make sense and that our attempt to make them make sense is nothing more than us conjuring resolution when there is none–that’s not a particularly happy message. That’s one way to look at it. On the other hand, I actually find this message to be affirming, and I find it to be very brave. In case any of my students happen to stumble on this blog, this is where they might know what’s coming, because this is what I say when I put “The White Album” in front of them. For me, “The White Album” is an encouraging, affirming, and life-giving essay because it is a much-needed reminder that life not making sense is, in fact, what life is all about. Furthermore, us trying to make sense of it even when it doesn’t make sense–that’s also what life is all about. Even though we know the effort might often be fleeting, it’s still worth it to try to find some semblance of meaning in the craziness of our daily lives; or, as Didion puts it, “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” This is why we tell ourselves stories, and this is how the process of storytelling–in every sense of the word, including the stories of our own lives–helps us live. It is possible to reach a more nihilistic conclusion from the essay, but for me, the fact that it exists–the fact that she published it–shows her ultimate insistence that there’s still value in the search for meaning, even if the search might prove fruitless on some levels. It’s a brave thing for Didion to do: to throw the mess of her own life on paper, to give us a string of disparate moments, all to confront the inescapable plight we all go through when it comes to the search for meaning in our world. I have benefitted greatly from her bravery, and I am grateful that I’ll be able to revisit her words for years to come.
If you only read one thing from Joan Didion, I of course recommend it being “The White Album.” But if you don’t stop there, there are many more things worth your attention. The previously-mentioned The Year of Magical Thinking is perhaps the most powerful collection of words, sentences, and paragraphs ever written on the actual experience of grief. Play It As It Lays is an ahead-of-its-time novel from 1970, although I actually would choose A Book of Common Prayer as the place to start with her fiction. The protagonist of that book, Charlotte Douglas, is one of the more memorable characters I’ve ever read. But you could also find any of the countless pieces of journalism she published in the past 7 decades. There’s no shortage of Joan Didion pieces out there, and all will have at least one piece of gold in them. You could also start by watching the recent Netflix documentary about her, The Center Will Not Hold.
Joan Didion was the best. She was the coolest. I wish I could have met her, and I wish I could have been in a room to hear her talk. Instead, I’ll have to stick to the words she put on the page. Luckily, she left us lots of those.
Quick comments about some recent reading:
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen – I have loved all Franzen books I’ve read, and Crossroads continues that trend. What I like most about this novel is what I love so much The Corrections: From my perspective, it doesn’t seem to be trying to make some grand statement about societal issues or about politics. It’s not trying to preach to me or let me know that it is clued into another level of societal correctness which I can access if I read closely. Instead, it’s a book about a small group of characters and their mundane, realistic lives. Don’t get me wrong–you could definitely pick apart Crossroads to find some political message or subtext. But that would be missing the point, in my opinion, and you read a Franzen novel to see how he crafts complex and charitable depictions of human beings.
Bewilderment by Richard Powers – I thoroughly enjoyed Powers previous novel, The Overstory. I think what I liked most about Bewilderment is how different it was. The Overstory won so many big awards, and I love that this new novel, rather than just recycle, is different in so many ways. That being said, the book is a serious gut-punch. I think I feel comfortable saying it’s a beautiful novel about a man, his son, and their shared grief, but I mean “beautiful” in the same way I would say Manchester by the Sea is a beautiful film.
Matrix by Lauren Groff – This one wasn’t for me. I can safely say I only finished this book because I didn’t want to not finish it. It never caught hold with me at all, but if you are interested in Marie de France, this is probably a must-read.
woddtomble 