Joan Didion and me: reading, honoring, and loving a literary and journalistic titan
ERIC BAZAIL-EIMIL: I had just walked out of the local YMCA. I was sitting in the car getting settled after a workout when I got a text message from a friend. He had screenshotted the push notification from The New York Times. “Joan Didion dies at 87,” it read.
In the wake of a year that saw so many greats leave us, from former Senator Bob Dole (R-KS), to feminist writer bell hooks, to legends of the arts like Cicely Tison and Stephen Sondheim, and music icons like Vicente Fernandez and Johnny Pacheco, incalculable loss seems somewhat tired and passé to say. What does incalculable loss even mean anymore, against the backdrop of a global pandemic that continues to take thousands of lives every single day both in the United States and around the world? I don’t know. We can’t possibly know. Sometimes, we just know it when we see it.
It hurt reading that notification. It hurt in such a visceral and raw way unlike anything I had ever felt before at the news of a notable death. Losing Joan Didion is incalculable.
This essay will not read as beautifully as the obituaries and essays you’ll find in The Atlantic or The New York Times. I’ve made my peace with that.
There’s a certain pressure when you honor a literary titan like Didion. Every single one of her sentences thrills its readers. Reading Didion could itself be a masterclass in how to maximize the English language. How do you encapsulate the greatness of such a gifted thinker without falling somehow short of their prowess and style?
You can’t. I certainly can’t.
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I first fell in love with Didion’s writing when I bought a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking on a whim my senior year of high school. The book lingered on my shelf for some time until I brought it with me on a trip to Atlanta to have something to pass the time. I still remember reading the book on the Marriott Marquis pool deck on a late May afternoon, the smell of chlorine and sunscreen mixing with the tangy odor of the pages. I still remember quietly sobbing in my seat on the flight back as I finished the book, gutted, yet hooked, by her blunt, to-the-point exposition on grief and its lack of resolutions. Graduation had just happened. I was moving to Georgetown. Didion helped me understand the grief I was feeling as I started a new chapter.
Four months later, my grandmother died. It was the first major loss I had experienced in my life. I returned to Didion’s words. Life changes in the instant, the ordinary instant. Didion gave me the language to make sense of my pain, the chaos around me, the alienating and discomfiting feeling of personal loss as I already felt lost among new faces, normative regimes and pressures. “One person is missing and the whole world feels empty,” Didion wrote. The already empty world only got emptier.
Five months after that, a global pandemic came onto the scene and I found myself re-reading Didion. One email changed my life for eighteen months. I went from Washington to Weston. Life changes in the instant, the ordinary instant. Didion helped me make peace with these jolts, these painfully standard and banal interruptions to the course of life we had charted for ourselves. That quote, and several others from The Year of Magical Thinking, have since found their way into many of my essays, including one on the Parkland shooting I wrote for On the Record earlier this year.
As my COVID-19 sojourn in Florida continued into 2021, Didion became my refuge in an entirely different way. Reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Play It as It Lays helped me find new worlds and new moments, new people and new scenery, though I remained confined to the walls of my childhood home for most of that Spring. Through the Summer and Fall, I continued leafing through them, as well as Let Me Tell You What I Mean, as I continued making sense of the chaos as we returned.
Didion leaves us right when more chaos looms. The Omicron variant threatens the progress made against the pandemic up until this point. The economy is opaque. Redistricting is likely to exacerbate the current erosion of our democratic system as both parties seek to consolidate power at the expense of competitive, fair and free elections. The climate crisis is only getting worse. Even in the face of cataclysmic indicators, the industrialized world is doing little to stop polar ice caps from melting faster than expected. The inequalities in American society have only deepened.
What will we do without her striking, insightful and cool diagnoses of American disorder and the complications arising from our nation’s troubled psyche? What will we do without her voice and her gaze?
She’d probably tell us to pause our tears and write the stories she couldn’t.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion once wrote. Perhaps in that way, Didion reminds us that journalism, when done properly, is a craft so deeply associated with active living. We can live not only through the stories we hear, the characters we are enthralled with, and the places we discover, but also in the stories we craft. We can give life to others in this public service. Whether we end up doing so is anyone’s best guess, and I leave determinations about individual success to each journalist’s personal introspections. But we can do so when we commit to journalism as an art and not just a career.
Reading Didion is to appreciate that about her writing. Loving Didion and honoring her legacy is to ensure her style and her journalistic and literary vision live on. It is to witness, write, and communicate the fractures in our nation’s soul to others.
Joan Didion, over a sixty year career of essays, plays, novels and other contributions to American letters, helped her readers live a little bit more fully. Those of us who follow in her footsteps should as well. I know I will.
Eric Bazail-Eimil is a lead editor at On the Record. A junior in the School of Foreign Service majoring in Regional and Comparative Studies, Eric is originally from South Florida.