This book is $25.00 in hardcover. It’s little, too. I almost admire the gall of whomever made that decision, though my boyfriend works in a bookstore and he’s the one who got it for me. So, easy for me to say. Also I doubt it’s preventative. If you’re buying this tiny book in hardcover, you love Joan Didion already and what more intimate subject is there than death? What more do you want to know about someone?
She already did this for us once so we know it must be different, and it is, from what I can remember. It hardly even feels like a book. It doesn’t feel whole or entire, which I suppose is the great illusion of the novel, and to a lesser extent but still definitely to a significant extent, most narrative. That seems like a big statement but I think we know what we like: beginning, middle, end. This is all end, and retracing, all sad repetition. It feels fractured. The voice feels fractured.
I read half of this book the first night I had it, the second half the next night. I stayed up way past my bedtime both nights. At work the second day I put it on my desk and looked at it all day and felt excited to get home to it. This happens with books for me sometimes, when they are just what I want. It reminds me of being a kid, when books were my secret thing I had, and had to look forward to. They were never a thing to pass the time, they made me forget time. This little book did that for me, which is to say all the things this book is not did not diminish it for me.
She doesn’t do that satisfying memoir thing where everything makes sense in retrospect, not even in the subtle Joan Didion way where maybe a conclusion isn’t written but we’re left with an image that feels poignant if not only for the rhythm with which she writes it.
There’s hardly even any rhythm, which is hard. Harder still when she addresses it. I sat up in bed that first night really in disbelief, missing that Joan-typical commanding of every line. She wrote almost like one would in a diary one did not expect anyone to read. Just honest questions, repeated over and over. I mentioned this to my boyfriend, how maybe I didn’t remember because it had been so long since I read The Year of Magical Thinking but it feels like this is unlike anything she’s written. All of her control is gone, and maybe that is necessary for this. Maybe she set out to do it, to somehow “go deeper” or be more fundamental or primal or whatever this is, stringing through sentences without any real momentum other than disbelief, or horror, or a wail.
But then she addresses it: her rhythm is gone. She talks about how she used to write, knowing exactly where words would go just to sound right, facts negligible. It was incredible, to have her admit that. Maybe it was a mistake. And now, she says, she’s lost it. She still has moments of it, to be sure. But it is not all strung together. It does not dominate. It does not silence your doubts, quiet your running commentary. It does not render you in awe. Your awe is punctuated by her defiance of her own control. She seems to refuse it, then tell us she isn’t refusing, she just can’t even get there. Oh, it is not easy to read.
Then she addresses her privilege in a way that is totally unsatisfactory for the reader she means to address (I mean, probably everyone at this point because it becomes clear how ridiculously privileged their lives are through the course of this book). I went from a little thrilled she was addressing it (take that, Kael!) to feeling very sad. She sounds defensive. She has not, it seems, reconciled it. Why couldn’t she just say, Yes, this is how my life is, I will not apologize but I will acknowledge that this colors my worldview in most ways, but it is my story and this is how it goes.” Or why didn’t she reject the idea of reconciling or defending her privilege? Why didn’t she just try and get away with it, continue in her planting of that strange breed of aspiration in women: to be both an intellectual and glamorous. I’ve never gotten that, perhaps because I assume it will always be unattainable to me (on both counts), but I was saddened by Joan’s dismissal of us for being judgmental. This is the premise of her entire writing career: definitive little details, offered to us so that we may draw our own conclusions.
She has written this almost-book about her family and her failings as a mother and she has turned her incisiveness on herself, naming off hotels and sweaters and maids by brand and year and geography, and then tries to tell us we’re being judgmental when she was the one who set it up for us. She taught us to read her that way.
Then it occurs to me that her deliberateness might not really be that, may not be deliberate at all. What if it just sounded right to her ear? She said it was so easy, she heard all of it in her head before she had written it.
This book unravels in places, like the privilege place. It is very sad. Not in the “What a sad situation!” way. Just in the, What a sad person way. What sadness there is. She no longer dominates the story she is telling. She doesn’t come out ahead of what she is interrogating as she usually would — she doesn’t win because she’s Joan Didion and she has the magical cadence inside of her and that way of controlling her subject by dissecting it. She is her subject, and she fails at dissecting herself.
And I think that may have been the point. It’s a really fucked up book. It’s incredible. Or maybe it’s nothing. But I am a Joan Didion apologist so INCREDIBLE, I say.
