“Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare,” Joan Didion told The Paris Review in 1978. “Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it.”
The New Journalist’s forebears made their way to her now-notorious Golden Coast by covered wagon, voyaging alongside the Donners, and parting ways with the party just in time to evade cannibalism’s lure. A century later, with eight essay collections, five novels, four memoirs, and six plays for stage and screen, Didion aimed an icy transparent eyeball at American empire, already teetering on the brink of collapse. That brutal reserve, particularly when confronting the most vulnerable subjects—abortion, abduction, the death of her own husband and child—erected a wry, gin-soaked distance between the maverick, her contemporaries, and her readership.
From Malibu to Jakarta to San Salvador to the Upper East Side, Joan documented the decay of faith in the West, where schoolchildren dropped LSD and revolutions were made and unmade to fit financiers’ whims. She was there when Jim Morrison slipped his dick into plastered-on leather pants, and more alluring, more imposing than the hole left by her subject’s demise. She was there when Reagan and George H. W. Bush sold the democratic process to the banks. And she was there when that epic monument to greed, the World Center, not to mention my innocence, dustified.
Hobbled with loss and ideological fury, the new millennium saw this monolith gorging ice cream, barely able to walk down the aisle of her Broadway debut, let alone surpass one hundred pounds. When she died, she left behind only a 71st Street apartment, which sold for $5.4 million. I leased it in a dream, where I set up a rollaway bed among the empty bird’s egg blue bookshelves, receiving nurses and lovers as I too prepared to perish between the author’s walls. So what remains in the end? Celine sunglass reflections in an age without recourse. That, and the stories we tell ourselves.
-David Fishkind