Superficial Consolations: The Life and Work of Joan Didion – The American Spectator | USA News and Politics

In retrospect, it seems clear that at least one reason for Didion s exalted reputation was the fact that she was, in a very significant sense, the bard of America s self-regarding left-wing cultural elite people who, like her, divided their lives between Manhattan and L.A., and who considered a place like, say, Miami (not Miami Beach) as exotic and alien as, well, El Salvador. For Didion, as for such readers, politics was, no less than clothing and interior decoration, supremely a matter of taste and style; one sneered at Ronald Reagan for the same reason that one rolled one s eyes at some poor rube s polyester outfit or garden apartment in Reseda.

It was 9/11 that brought Didion s signal attributes as a writer into the sharpest focus. She and Dunne had moved back to New York in 1988, but when her city was attacked by Islamic terrorists she seemed determined above all not to be emotional, not to be patriotic, not to be Islamophobic, not to be angry and this from a woman whose writings routinely registered the deep psychological perturbations she experienced as a result of what you or I would consider the most trivial of upper-class First World inconveniences. In a chillingly ugly little book called Fixed Ideas (2003), Didion mocked the idea that firemen can be heroes and that the Al-Qaeda terrorists hated America for its freedom. Never were her knee-jerk snobbery and solipsism, and her long-since-hardened refusal to speak a kind word about her country, more unbearable.

And then came her big third-act success with The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), an account of her life during the year after Dunne died on December 30, 2003. This piece of pulse-taking, which was later adapted into a one-woman Broadway play starring Didion s friend Vanessa Redgrave, is her best book because, finally, she wasn t pretending to be writing about anything other than herself, and because, at the same time, for once she actually displayed genuine interest in another human soul which is to say that she was truly shocked by Dunne s sudden death, and that during the ensuing year she was every inch the truly grieving widow.

The follow-up, Blue Nights (2011), which records her reactions to the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo, on August 26, 2005, is a more uncomfortable read, marked by unseemly self-absorption and staggeringly inappropriate moments of utter shallowness, one of which I noted in a piece published earlier this year: Didion & rattles off as if they, with all their worldly splendor, held the key to salvation itself the names of the hotels in which Quintana Roo stayed before she was five or six or seven and of course they re all fancy-schmancy hostelries, from the Ritz in Paris to the Dorchester in London. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison again: For Didion, only surfaces matter.

Yes, and yet. In her later years the occasional glimpse of Didion receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Obama, for example, or talking with her nephew Griffin Dunne in his 2017 documentary about her, The Center Will Not Hold could arouse great pity. She was always a tiny woman, and after Dunne died she not only looked frightfully frail but exuded the wide-eyed pathos of a little girl in a Walter Keane which is to say Margaret Keane painting. For all the valedictory tributes, she looked terribly lost, terribly alone. All her adult life she d embraced the totems of the leftist beau monde

via spectator.org

One thing Didion wrote that I thought was okay was an early piece, perhaps a novel, in which she was a young woman, back from NYC I think, with her hipster, East Coast boyfriend. She criticized him for throwing his cigarette out their car window, because wildfires, you know. I thought that was sort of a nice touch. But yes, all of the later stuff I looked at was just so brittle and superficial. For anyone with a life, there just was no time for it.