Welcome to missed connections, where I recommend a book to someone I was too distant from or distracted by or shy to actually… recommend a book to. Today, I am really going to embarrass myself! Can we just agree that even if we disagree, we can still be friends? OK great.
Dear Brooklyn Library Patron who placed a hold on The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion and was in for a months-long wait,
Last week, I received a letter from the finance department of Brooklyn Public Library. They were wondering where their books are; they sent me a bill for $172.63 which I didn’t have to pay if I would only just please return their fucking books already! People are waiting, you spoiled brat!
It didn’t exactly say that. I’m not sure, actually, what it said. I felt so embarrassed that, after I got the gist, I threw the letter away and walked those egregiously overdue books directly back to the library. I felt so thoughtless and selfish for hanging onto books that weren’t mine for so long. I can feel my ears getting red just thinking about it now. If you work for the Brooklyn Public Library finance department, I promise that’s not the real me!
I kept one in particular, the book you’ve been patiently waiting for for so long— The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion— on my desk because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to read it. The cover is that iconic photo of Joan Didion, long, elegant fingers casually flicking a cigarette, and she stared at me for weeks.
Of course I wanted to read it, right? But I kept picking it up and putting it back down without opening the cover. So many of my favorite writers love Joan Didion: Hilton Als, Stephanie Danler. When she passed away and many of her personal effects were auctioned off, I joked to my boyfriend about using my tuition money to bid on her also iconic Celine sunglasses, which ended up going for $27,000. Of course I would read her biography. I’m a writer who wants to be sparse and honest and smoke a cigarette while leaning against a car, therefore I’m a disciple of Joan Didion.
Joan Didion is a god. She is a queen. She is everything so many of us wish for ourselves but would never say out loud: chic, tiny, wildly successful, ethereally talented. Instead, easier, we say I love Joan Didion.
What’s true is that there are a lot of things I want to be that aren’t healthy or correct, so many things I wish for but would never say out loud. I want to be skinny. I want to buy expensive sunglasses and drink Coke for breakfast and be kind of rude and get away with it. I want to smoke cigarettes. I want people to take photographs of me that are eventually displayed in museums and printed on tote bags. I want to be an almost universally beloved writer. A writer! Can you believe that, that someone is so famous for the words she typed up and put down on a piece of paper? And fuck being a universally beloved writer. I just want to be loved.
Instead of considering why I want those things, I love Joan Didion. I smoke a cigarette every now and then. I drink Diet Coke with abandon. I walk miles on a treadmill, bored out of my mind, in the hope that I’ll lose just another pound, and then just one more. I write, but not that well and not that much. It’s much easier and much more fun than doing the actual work, the writing, to love Joan Didion and hope that will be enough.
It’s easy to mindlessly worship someone, to use them as an icon, to put all of my complicated feelings about my body and my writing and where I live and who I am in a drawer and instead try to flatten myself into a template of someone else. And I like Joan Didion, I really do. I respect what she did, what her words continue to do. I’ve learned so much from her and I actually, truly love her fiction. But I don’t love her, and I don’t think she would want me to.
The summer before I moved from South Carolina to New York, my mom took my sister and I on a trip to Florida. I went on long, sweaty jogs every morning in the heavy summer air and listened to South and West on audiobook. I was about to be an MFA student studying creative writing in New York, already feeling wildly intimidated, so it seemed like the time to brush up on the books of Joan. I remember running through a hot parking lot, asphalt uneven, and spotting two brightly colored parakeets tucked away in a palm tree, while listening to Didion describe the South— an entire region— as something ugly, brutal and slow. “In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect,” Didion writes. I guess she missed the beignets, the way you can find someone playing piano or jazz around every other corner, the parades and art and food and writing and river winding lazily around all of it.
In South and West, Joan Didion and her husband breeze through her so-called South while reducing an entire landscape to a two dimensional idea that she used to— what? I’m still not sure. Assure herself that she was safe, that she was “right”, from her perch in California? What really made me sad— what made me feel, ridiculously, betrayed by someone I had and would never meet— was that she made her writing iconic by steeping herself in her beloved home state of California and writing about it with breathtaking honesty. The highlight of Didion’s oeuvre, for me at least, is how well— how both brutally and beautifully— she does setting, so it felt shocking to read this about a place she barely knew. A place she visited and left with a towel printed with a confederate flag, which she kept in her “linen closet in California amid thick and delicately colored Fieldcrest beach towels.” I can’t imagine driving around California for a month and being sure enough that I understood its nuances well enough to write an entire book about it. There’s an undercurrent in this book, a lack of humility or unwillingness to understand that makes me uneasy. I understand that the south can be “rank and old,” and I agree that it has a complicated, hideous history, but reading Didion’s descriptions made me feel protective in an almost childlike way of a place that I know deeply. Like, I can talk about my sister because I know them; if a stranger speaks one word about them, I’ll feel ready for a fight. Lorraine Berry writes about South and West that, “Most people who read Didion are going to have their views of the South confirmed, will have none of their views challenged, and will have learned almost nothing new.” I found this disappointingly true.
Of course, of course, I’m projecting, which is probably why South and West makes me bristle. There are some beautifully rendered truths in her book, like this: “I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.” The south- the part where I grew up, at least— is home to horrific racism, anger that takes wild, terrifying turns, and this is reflected in our collective surprise at events like the insurrection on January 6th, an event that shocked me but that I could imagine people I knew back home, in college, even, participating in. It’s important to notice this: there is a lot of bad still happening in the South. And perhaps it’s unfair to judge this book, which is really a collection of notes never intended for publication. I do think Joan Didion is worthy of all of the praise she gets— I just don’t want to unthinkingly attempt to scurry in the footsteps of a woman that I admire more for the artistic, black and white photos of her than her actual writing. I’m almost sure she would hate that.
I’m so sorry to dump all of this onto you, the person who was waiting for so long for me to return The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, so you could read it. And you should! Maybe I will, once I’m done unpacking my Joan Didion baggage, most of which is my own insecurity as a writer and jealousy, my lack of success. That biography will probably prove me wrong on all of this. But can I recommend another book I think you might like? That I loved? That welcomes shades of gray, all that’s messy and true and necessary, in between the south and the west?
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee is a collection of essays that comprises this stunning memoir. I took a class from Marie-Helene Bertino last year (magic!) and one day she gave us a handout of Alexander Chee’s 100 Rules for Writing a Novel, excerpted from this book. I loved the list so much, which was about how to write a novel but was also about how to be a person in the world, (“1. Sometimes music is needed. 2. Sometimes silence.”), that I still carry it around with me now, tucked into a book in my bag like it’s my lucky ticket. Chee writes with so much grace and vulnerability, about embracing his identity, facing a childhood marred by sexual abuse, growing roses. It’s somehow both sad and optimistic, instructional and interrogative. It’s an eloquent reflection on a life in a world that can be malevolent and benevolent in unequal, unfair measures. I think you should read The Last Love Song, but if I could, I would put this book in your hands, give you a big hug and a cup of tea, watch your kids or walk your dog so you had some time to read.
I hope you love both books, you patient, lovely Brooklyn library patron.
Love,
Stuart