Self-Respect, Revisited
Joan Didion, smoking in front of a fancy car.
Content note: Brief discussion of rape
For some writers, the discovery of Joan Didion is a rite of passage. Reading her bold, apocalyptic prose stirs something in us. She inspires a desire to write and chronicle the present. I first read Didion in snatches before, during, and after work. On the train, in cafes waiting on disappointing men, in the break room during my lunch. I read her nonfiction like scripture. Whatever mania Didion investigated, from dams to the history of Sacramento, I followed her.
Manias offer so much in the way of enjoying life. Obsession is a way of reading. I would rather be gripped and haunted than loose and spinning out. Joan Didion is always gripped by something. Nancy Reagan, self-pity, Hemingway, and California, always. Her spare prose flirts with us, afraid of cheap serenity.
Didion’s author photos are always striking. Smoking against cars, smoking against kitchen tables, smoking on the porch with her beautiful family, smoking while writing at a typewriter, and of course her 2015 Celine ad. Didion, for her own part, was critical of identity politics and feminism, even as she rose to be beloved by every Brooklyn white girl who hoped to be a writer. At some point Didion was declawed and became an intellectual Carrie Bradshaw. Didion was critical of the women’s movement, disliked Doris Lessing, and had mixed feelings about Joan Baez and hippies. Her mixed feelings were key to her success. She hovered between condemnation and moral ambiguity.
Didion’s new collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, focuses primarily on the subject of writing. Didion pulls back the veil of her words. Words are “tools, toys, weapons to be deployed.” In one essay, she discusses her failure to write short stories and struggling to find her telescopic “I” that later became her signature flare, as Hilton Als points out in his beautiful new foreword. It is her awareness of her position that makes her writing so crisp, Als tells us.
Writing about writing is always a dangerous game. It can become a bit too cute and swerve into self-indulgence, something Didion hated. In her new collection, she writes about Hemingway with pure adoration, praising his “romantic individualism.” Didion writes extensively about Hemingway’s legacy, performing an autopsy on the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms. I’ve never been that interested in Hemingway myself, but Didion’s rapture is intoxicating. She predicts the rise of autofiction when she condemns readers for trying to discover Hemingway’s biography through his fiction. She points to readers “increasing inability… to construe fiction as anything other than a roman a clef.”
I can’t think of anything more appropriate to the rise of writers like Lauren Oyler and Patricia Lockwood. Even in Hemingway’s time, readers were sniffing out the morality and truth of novels, something Didion shuts down. Autofiction and memoir seem to split and wrap around each other, each demanding more truth from the other.
Personal writing has existed ever since the first person to keep a diary. Who knows what troubled them so much they needed to write it down? In a few centuries, we’ve accelerated from the diary to the personal essay. The Huffington Post, Jezebel, and numerous other websites began to churn out fad diet journals, take downs, and confessions. People confess all sorts of things on the internet. Whether they were paid or not, from Tumblr to Youtube, the confession became attached to witnesses. The deeply personal writing of the 2000s and early 2010s has changed a bit though; we now bend more towards cynicism and hot takes in 280 character bursts. Better to have a self-critical, more nihilistic take. Why not beat someone to the punch?
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Many contemporary essays and autofiction contain ‘On the other hand’ or ‘I also feel’ or ‘Others may say...’ I’m sure I’ll say at least one of these phrases here. Sally Rooney’s Normal People has been critiqued for its skating over class while bringing up discussions of politics as an aesthetic in and of itself, as Katy Waldman has written about in the New Yorker. Politics as a backdrop, as artifice, or a signifier of initiation. The characters in Normal People talk about James Baldwin books as if they signify being ‘with it.’ While Normal People is a novel, the idea of politics and cynicism as an aesthetic is certainly widespread in contemporary culture, from the hot take to self-effacing indie folk to the films of Tarantino. There is an obsession with discerning what a good person is while also subtly evading the notion of morality.
Many early autobiographical works were literal confessions, accountings of the self to God, such as the works of St. Augustine or St. Paul. A thin line exists between prayer, sermon, and apology. In her essay “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston,” Jia Tolentio tells us Christianity’s impact. “Years of auditing my own conduct in prayer gave me an obsession with everyday morality.” This obsession with everyday morality seems at the core of modern writing. A self-surveillance. Characters need to produce and dissect their own morality, as Lauren Oyler has written. But cynicism or being aware of the apocalyptic world around us is not a morality in and of itself.
Feminist critic and scholar bell hooks has a critique of this worldview. “Cool Cynicism” is an essay by hooks about watching Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. Her argument is that displaying the world as it is is not revolutionary. Perhaps this argument sounds simple on the face of it, but the impact is far-reaching. Showing the world as it is, broken, nasty, racist, homophobic, classist, is not revelatory, interesting, or groundbreaking. To shock is not to inspire action. No one is perhaps arguing that Didion is a revolutionary writer. But her cool or reserved writing about the center not holding is beloved not for its critique but for its aesthetic. It is beautiful to see apocalypse. In hooks’s words, “a good cynical read on life can be compelling, entertaining and downright satisfying.”
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Memoirs that shock or confess trauma are never far from popular consciousness. I remember reading a memoir in a college class and our professor asking us to debate if the woman’s story of rape was “true.” Many of the memoirs we read in the class were by women and often the professor seemed to love to play devil’s advocate, wanting us to tear apart the memoir as a genre. Why teach this class? I wondered. Why bother if memoir is just a weak genre? Memoirs get so deep under our skin, they incite something in us. Some memoirs make national news.
Vivian Gornick argues for the memoirist to “Think of how many years on the couch it takes to speak about oneself, but without all the whining and complaining, the self-hatred and the self-justification that make the analys
and a bore to all the world but the analyst.” In The Situation and the Story, Gornick’s book on ‘personal narrative,’ she argues for the importance of not falling into sentimentality or cynicism. Gornick warns of the “pit of confessionalism or therapy.” Instead, Gornick points to Didion as one of her patron saints.I’m not sure what this voice is. Is it a detached one? I’m not sure even Didion is a detached persona, at least not fully. Does it mean stating things unemotionally, as in Didion’s famous line: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce?” If so, I would argue that restraint is its own affect. Some memoirs may call for moral outrage or anger or sorrow. Many come to mind such as Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature or Audre Lorde’s Zami. These memoirs do not attempt ‘restraint,’ instead they fully dig into the authors’ lived experiences through lyrical, painful, and joyful language. These authors’ aims do not neatly align with Gornick’s idea of the removed author. There seems to hover a ghostly editor in Gornick’s work that I’ve not been able to figure out.
Didion has written about the fear of self-pity extensively in The Year of Magical Thinking. Yet, she goes on, and lays bare the trauma of watching her husband die. Her restraint in that book gives way to grief. Her sentences are terse but packed with emotion: “For a long time I wrote nothing else.” She obsessively writes dates down, discussing memory and different death practices throughout culture. “...I would be fine alone. And I was. Until the morning. When, only half awake, I tried to think why I was alone in bed.” Or, her sparse thoughts on food. “Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.”
Even more recently, Didion is evasive in her Time interview. She seems nihilistic. When asked what she can offer to those grieving their loved ones, she offers no advice. When asked if she has hope, she responds “Hope for what? Not particularly, no.”
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Didion had a wide, successful, professional sweep. She produced a cohesive identity and body of work as an author. She wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Life, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. She did not write small pieces for blogs nor did she ever create her own blog or write little updates on her life. She was established long before the explosion of the internet and never had to.
I’ve certainly done my fair share of internet writing about dating, loneliness, and friendship. I often wondered what I gave up, sold, or gained in the process. Didion, on her end, never seems to regret past exposure or writing. Perhaps this is her self-respect, her ability to sleep at night that she writes so wonderfully about in “On Self-Respect.” Didion discusses her concept of self-respect, the ability to answer the telephone without fear, the lineage of respecting one’s life through lineage, and the ability to sleep well. What morals that allow for this Didion does not specify.
Didion’s allure to young writers is her success as a singular voice. Writers and artists now are scampering for a piece of the pie. One article here, another there. Few are lucky to only work in one medium. Artists are exposing their work younger and younger, the paper trail is larger, and the mistakes more visible. Everyone has a messy CV. People try one medium and then another. Only a lucky few land at Vogue or the New Yorker.
Art and writing must be witnessed and consistent. Social media demands artists and writers find a singular voice and stick to it. You can juggle many projects, but they better all contain the essential product: you. Didion knew this all too well, even before the proliferation of the cult of celebrity. Her work always leads back to her life, whether as a Californian, a mother, or an outsider-insider.
The memoir has turned into an identity product. Many internet writers will write their book in hopes of a TV deal. Jacob Tobia’s Sissy and Harron Walker’s subsequent piece come to mind, although Tobia is not the only one attempting to produce an identity through a book in hopes of creating a brand. Walker questions this kind of identity-as-brand memoir and its place in (self) constructing historical firsts. This chase many trans people feel around cultural production to be the ‘first’ at something is dangerous. To be clear, this too has been written about in trans literary discourse before. Too often memoirs claim to be firsts. Rarely is a memoir as earth shattering as we are told. In desiring to be first, how much do we lose and shave off the jagged weird parts of ourselves? The less comforting parts?
More and more people are forced into an identity hole. The gig economy is forcing people to try on as many hats as they can and look seamless doing it. Few have a legacy to leave behind, instead offering a scattered, loosely-connected body of work that ranges from podcasts to zines to Instagram feeds. Didion published books. Now, the product is us. And we’re not the ones making money off it, unless we’re the rare writer or artist to get some sort of deal memo. It’s much easier to have self-respect for yourself as a writer if you are rewarded with lucrative book deals. Literary starlets like Didion, especially in the realm of nonfiction are fewer and far between. The cultural critic has gone to Twitter, using memes to supplement their character limit.
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The sentimentalizing of narrative is one of Didion’s main preoccupations. She considers what it means to be responsible for one’s life, to not give into self-pity. This fear seems to be the same one Gornick contends with. In various essays, Didion boxes with the creation of New York as consumption, as a state of mind rather than a geographical reality. She eschews this view of the city, but in doing so creates her own story. The insider-outsider. Her idea of self-respect, to sleep at night, to be able to answer the telephone, is one of being in control. She wrote all of this before she wrote about Miami, Salvador, and the Central Park Five. After such overtly political works, liking one’s self seems besides the point in Didion’s world. By the 1990s, the apocalypse seems all but inevitable. She is bitterly disillusioned with the myth of the self-made man in Where I Come From, her origin story, discussing the myths of California and rugged survivalism.
And yet, on the other hand, in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Didion returns to the koan-like style of her early columns. She roams hospitals and stares at the ice melting in the Hudson. In the 2017 documentary, The Center Will Not Hold, she talks about eating only congee. Grief overrides structure.
Didion’s appeal hinges on her ability to turn the doorknob and let us in just enough. Her writing appeals to a reader in its dissection of personal tragedy. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion, like many people writing about their personal lives, is concerned with the problem of self-pity. She reports the fear of “dwelling on it.” The it, in this case, being the death of her husband and daughter in short succession. Didion considered herself lucky up until that point, she writes. Self-pity is the primal fear of memoirists.
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In one of the essays in Didion’s new collection, “Everywoman.com," Didion attempts to understand what Martha Stewart represents to her fans. Why are people obsessed with her enough to buy her expensive roses and place-settings and magazines? She calls Stewart a survivor. A “dust-bowl story,” Stewart is not just a happy homemaker, but a threat to men, someone with an IPO and a success story. This gets closer to why Didion herself is so beloved. She cut a path. Perhaps it is a path no longer available, with its shimmer and sheen, a story of stark success. We love a survival story. We love to hear we too can survive. Perhaps we need those stories “in order to live.” In many ways, she is a paragon of the world she critiques.
Didion traveled along the edge of destruction and then dealt with tragedy in her own house. Time stops. A great writer gets up to try to turn on her television and see what new horrors are emerging.
This may be a typo in the ebook, but in the ebook it is “analys” and not “analysis.”