All Didion, All The Time

Last year it was Matthew Barney...

...this year, if I manage to follow through, there will be sustained looking at Joan Didion.

I'll start by admitting my ignorance. I hadn't read anything by Didion until March of this year. I bought Slouching Towards Bethlehem because I was mystified by the success of The Year of Magical Thinking, which I will probably never read because I am just too afraid of death and even more afraid of being the last one standing. I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to read that book, or even talk about it publicly. And yet last year folks did, and I figured that The Year of Magical Thinking must be some steely, girdered thing indeed if Didion can manage to sit and talk to Terry Gross about this total fucking horror of everyone dying because that horror is now a work of prose.

It seems obvious that turning reality into a story is an organizational task. That it's about creating structure. And speaking of structure, it turns out Slouching Towards Bethlehem was, to quote the horse's mouth, "...the first time (Didion) had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart."

I want to know how to structure that, because "things fall apart" is a theme around here. And I am interested in what exactly Didion does in the face of that falling apart. When things fall apart, it is easiest to be abject, aloof, ironic. A smartass or a know-it-all. Part of the peanut gallery. Didion doesn't seem, so far, to collapse in any of those directions, and in so doing she seems to create structure out of a specific kind of structurelessness that seems really relevant right now.