Last night, Joan Didion spoke at the New York Public Library. Though I wasn’t there, plenty of acquaintances, mostly of the online variety, were. They kept me posted through Twitter, with photos, observations, and snippets of her quotes.

There was a piece in the NYTimes — rather outdated at this point, at least, considering the rapid-fire way in which every newspaper, literary magazine, literary website, litblog, and more have covered Didion in the past month — that describes Didion’s writing in “Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights” similarly: “‘Magical Thinking’ narrated the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, through the rhythms of obsessive memory. ‘Blue Nights’ takes a similar approach.”

I think it’s crucial to point out a recurring theme in these profiles, in these interviews; a repeating note, if you will: all of this talk about rhythm.

It’s always been true that one cannot speak of Didion without speaking of rhythm, and while this is still true, the proverbial page has turned.

NYC-based writer Hannah Miet, who attended last night’s NYPL event, wrote about it here and said, “It was hard to write because it needed a new rhythm, one she had never used before. She said she had to make up the rhythm as she went along.”

So always, it is back to the rhythm.

((**More to come on last night’s NYPL event, from a fellow Didion devotee. Stay tuned!**))

Listen to the podcast of Joan Didion, interviewed by Chris Lydon here (or download as an mp3).

“Joan Didion wore a purple scarf and her trademark oversized glasses last night at the sold-out Harvard Book Store-sponsored event at First Parish Church in Cambridge. She was in town to promote her new book, the heartbreaking “Blue Nights,” which concerns the death of her daughter and which can, and likely will, be read as a macabre follow-up to 2005’s deeply affecting “The Year of Magical Thinking,” about the death of her husband.”

                                              — via The Boston Phoenix

“‘Blue Nights’ (is) a searing recounting of the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo, and Didion’s own struggles with aging and illness…So it seems only fitting that her nephew, actor and director Griffin Dunne (with Susanne Rostock), would at her request turn his camera on her to produce a mesmerizing glimpse of the writer. She can be seen reading from her new work in what Dunne describes as an “audiobook for the eyes” filled with family photos.”

— From “Joan Didion: Video of ‘Blue Nights’ and Daughter Quintana” on The Daily Beast.

The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicating a whole week to Didion. This thrills me in ways I can’t explain, especially because I’ve been on a kick of voraciously devouring everything written in the past month about Didion (there has been a lot) and greedily awaiting my copy of her upcoming memoir Blue Nights, which I pre-ordered almost two months ago (it has been too long).

Below is the kick-off to Didion Week at LAROB by Matthew Specktor, titled “Positions of Privilege.” Naturally, the subhead is “on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.”

“Joan Didion is, as we know, a cool customer. Long before The Year of Magical Thinking, in which a social worker calls her just that, we understood Didion to be cool in every sense of the word. Whatever was happening behind those bug-eyed sunglasses, within that frail frame, the author’s relentless arrangement of information — the research, the reshuffling — kept hot feeling in line. This was true in Play It As It Lays, where the institutionalized Maria Wyeth’s separation from her young daughter exists mostly between parentheses, and it was true in The Year of Magical Thinking, where the immediacy of loss is often cut with diagnostic material: W.H. Auden, observations about grief, and observations about those observations (‘the question of self-pity’) interceding before anyone gets wet. There is a moment in Blue Nights, in one sense The Year of Magical Thinking’s logical extension but in another sense unlike any book in Didion’s corpus, that seems to me specifically revealing: leaving a physical therapy session where she’s been working out alongside members of the New York Yankees (!), Didion remarks upon her declining capacities. ‘My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether,’ she writes. ‘Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.’”

Read the full article here.

Didion on the unexamined fact:

“You’re at its mercy. I’ve always had this sense that the unexamined fact is like a rattlesnake. It’s going to come after you. And you can keep it at bay by always keeping it in your eye line.”

This piece is beautiful, drawing the eye to differences between “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights.” It highlights the comparison in a very intelligent way. What is it to write after death? What is it?

“When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting. At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done—pages or page—all the way back to page one. I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past that blank terror.”

                                                                — Joan Didion

This was my lunchtime reading yesterday. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone who writes anything at all. I think there’s something to be said for the way that Didion balanced multiple types of writing, from fiction and nonfiction to literary journalism and screenwriting.

Read the interview in its entirety here.

Over at Specter Literary Magazine, Will Henderson talks Didion, loss, A Year of Magical Thinking and her newest, Blue Nights (which will be released Nov. 1, for those of us who are counting).

“I couldn’t read books, and I couldn’t concentrate on much else, and I wondered why I couldn’t read books, and why I couldn’t concentrate on much else, and then I was moving into a new apartment, and I was unpacking my 124 boxes of books – true story; I have 12 six-shelf bookshelves in my living room, double filled – and I came across The Year of Magical Thinking and I thought I’d like to re-read this book, and I re-read the book and this time, I recognized loss because I had lost and I recognized how vulnerable she is by writing so honestly about loss and I wrote down several of her sentences because I didn’t want to forget these sentences.”

Read the full column here.

ashleybethard:

I have reached a point where I cannot tell whether I feel like Maria Wyeth because of the book, or if I feel like Maria Wyeth because some part of me has always felt like Maria Wyeth.

There’s nothing like Play It As It Lays.

betterbooktitles:

Joan Didion: The White Album

Yes, I’m well aware I’m late on this.

(via sjbointernetpresence)

— Romancing the tome of Didion.

(via my Flickr photostream)