Joan Didion was known for her confident, self-assured statements and the surgical precision with which she observed the world. The one adjective continually invoked of her writerly persona and her work was cool. When she passed recently, one of the conversations that bubbled up about her life and her legacy was her identity as a writer and a mother. Online, some male writers asked if she was proof it was possible to be a great artist and a great parent—to be met with parent writers who quickly pointed out the nonsensicalness of that question. But if we look at Didion’s work itself, we see her contradictions. She is often admired for the clarity and conviction of her writing, but in her work, and how she thought of it, there is the uncertainty and tension between the demands of being a writer and the demands of being a mother. And certainly, in how Didion approached it, an understanding that to ask her to conceptualize the two was something that was never demanded of her male peers.
Where her nonfiction is all certainties and declarations, her fiction is a receptacle of ambiguities, vacillations, and deep anxieties. The topic of motherhood and her relationship to children straddles both genres. Though in her essays, such as her iconic collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, these anxieties surface as acrid, sometimes derisive observations, particularly of women, they also linger and lurk in the undercurrents. In her novels, including A Book of Common Prayer and Play It as It Lays, the anxieties often fuel the erratic behavior of the female protagonists who suffer the torment of repressed mania, among their many other conditions and plights. Her memoirs, each prompted by grief—Where I Was From, Blue Nights, and The Year of Magical Thinking—take rigorous inventory of life with her family while attempting to make sense of the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and soon after, their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.
Though not the central theme of her work, the motif of a mother losing her daughter haunts Didion’s fiction, beginning in Play It as It Lays, in which the protagonist longs for a sick daughter she cannot reach, and recurring in A Book of Common Prayer, in which a woman loses her daughter to a guerilla terrorist group. Even before she would lose her own child, the fear was a throbbing subconscious. “The death of children worries me all the time. It’s on my mind. Even I know that, and I usually don’t know what’s on my mind,” Didion revealed in a Paris Review interview in 1978. In the same interview, she admitted to not being able to write children as full characters, explaining that she structured Play It as It Lays in the way she did because she “ couldn’t write a child.”
Didion published Play It as It Lays in 1970, four years after she adopted her daughter. When Didion and Dunne welcomed their baby, Quintana, in 1966, Didion worried that she “would not be up to the task.” Though not an uncommon concern for many new parents, it likely presented a particularly daunting risk for Didion, as it does for most mothers with professional pursuits. Didion must have known that if becoming a mother had required her to compromise her career, and had her writerly prowess and creative genius dampened and eventually dwindled away into the dark endless universe of motherhood, there would have been no one but herself to mourn the loss. Think of all the geniuses who never came to fruition because they did not have Didion’s privileges and freedoms to write as they pleased. Time to write is essential for developing genius. It is also very expensive—Didion and Dunne were famous as screenwriters for hire and had the good fortune of making a living during the golden age of magazine publishing, when superstar writers could demand a premium price for their services. There are many reasons for the genius of artists to shrivel away: poverty, racial discrimination, legal status, and, yes, sexism. Didion, a unique case, grew into her talents unhindered. She made sure of it.
Her anxieties were already present in 1967 when she wrote about the hippy movement’s spin into chaos in her landmark piece, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” In the title essay, upon arriving to San Francisco, she is struck by the prevalence of runaway teenagers, some with “baby fat” still on their bodies. She traces the decay of what was supposed to be a transformative movement from the streets to the domestic space of a commune. Didion progressively zeroes in on the lives and complications of the residents of a commune called the Warehouse. She takes particular interest in the most domestic aspects of all: the children and a woman named Barbara who has curiously embraced what she calls “the woman’s thing” or “the woman’s trip.” She is the apparent caretaker of this complicated, constantly shifting household. While the other members toil in the confusing intricacies of good and bad acid trips, Barbara bakes macrobiotic pastries, tends a loom, and takes occasional jobs to earn money to support everyone else.
Didion quotes Barbara as saying, “Doing something that shows your love that way is just about the most beautiful thing I know.” And being the astringent critical observer that she has set out to be, Didion adds her own commentary, “Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-loving’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.”
All this is buildup to the most famous scene in her essay, an image that continues to serve as a point of discontent for so many of Didion’s close readers: In the commune, Didion comes across a five-year old child reading comic books while tripping on acid. In Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, the 2017 documentary on Didion’s life and literary career, she is asked about what she thought upon witnessing this scene. With subtle but visible pleasure, she answers, “It was gold. You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.”
That revelation is dumbfounding in its uninterrogated and unsympathetic bluntness—after Didion says this, the scene cuts without further questions from the film’s director (and Didion’s nephew), Griffin Dunne. It leaves people like me, who wrestle with Didion’s legacies while tracing her influence in our thinking, to wonder, How does one describe a person, let alone a mother, who would witness such a scene and respond not just with inaction, but most crucially, consider it “gold”?
The stark simplicity of her answer rang like a void, one that beckoned a downpour of assumptions and a flood of condemnation of Didion’s lack of empathy, especially as a mother. Yet, I read this moment as Didion responding to the question as a journalist who had doggedly chased a story. Such detachment, of course, is why many of those who build canons consider her a “genius.” In the politics of writing—who gets to publish, who gets to be considered good—dispassion, of detachment, “objectivity” are a cult and the writers who perform these qualities in the most legible ways get the accolades. But even as I write this, I think, Had Didion been asked to situate her answer in her own motherhood, not as a writer, her answer would have been different. Though with Didion, whose mind is at work beyond what can be deduced from the page, one can never be certain. There is always more. I think of her poignant accounting of her daughter’s sickness and death, where she wrote, “How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?”
With Didion, the more she says the less certain she sounds. Her declarative sentences, crafted with unmistakable style, sound better when they stand on their own, unbothered by inquiries or objections. Her clauses reverberate, with the dominance of cathedrals, certain marble-floored banks. They are structures meant to inspire awe and, for some, veneration. For others, they inspire a certain amount of not-unfounded terror or rage. Didion described writing as an act of coercion, almost abuse of the reader. What she was referring to is power—something that people of older generations and even some newer ones cannot compute with the idea of motherhood.
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Joan Didion and the Art of Motherhood
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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