JOAN DIDION MADE ME A KEEPER OF PRIVATE NOTEBOOKS

by Emily Blake

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was the first Didion book I ever read. I was fifteen years old, living in Phoenix, Arizona with my parents and staying in Los Angeles for winter break. I read it for five hours without looking up even though I was next to a picture-perfect pool scene that only 70-degree Winter could afford. When I finished the book, about a week later, I thought about it for weeks. I wrote in my journal about it. I read interviews with Didion. I couldn’t get enough. I had finished the book, but I felt like there was more hidden between its pages. This is, what I will later find out through just some self-reflection being 15 did not allow me, a fascination with Didion’s style, subject matter, and ultimately something I had never encountered before. I was insatiable to read the sublime combination of not only her incisive writing style, but the insights on what she referred to in Slouching Towards Bethlehem as the musings of a “keeper of private notebooks, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents” — documenting everything but negating any accusations of excess, irrelevance, or anything other than crucial insights.

Once I finished Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I went over to my grandmother’s house for weekly family dinner, only to see Play it as it Lays on the table next to her sofa. It made me realize Didion imparted in me a sort of generational consciousness that only her distinct approach could. For my grandmother, someone less than a decade younger than Didion, also born and raised in California, it was less of a discovery and more of a “of course I’m reading this, it’s Joan Didion.” Losing her and Eve Babitz has proven to be almost too much; it is a loss of this documenting that leaves all other writing feeling sterile and out-of-touch with real life in its wake.

In the announcement of Didion’s passing, The New York Times referred to her as the “‘New Journalist’ Who Explored Culture and Chaos” — while she “established a distinctive voice in American fiction before turning to political reporting and screenplay writing, it was California, her native state, that provided her with her richest material.” It is in her treating of California as “place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” which opened up by eyes at age 15 to a specificity of place that I hadn’t quite grasped before. When I moved across the country to New York for college, I was confronted with just how much where you are changes your inclinations towards what you write about. I think even reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem (and every other Didion piece I could get my hands on) in my formative years under the beating sun and the smell of creosote that opened my eyes to why the intention, the incisive quality, and the documenting of everyday that Didion embodied is so important to have as bedrock of what reporting can be.