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.
