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There was a piece in the NYTimes — rather outdated at this point, at least, considering the rapid-fire way in which every newspaper, literary magazine, literary website, litblog, and more have covered Didion in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!**))

“‘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.

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.

— Romancing the tome of Didion.

(via my Flickr photostream)

This is the post I have been promising to write for days, but then, you’re not here to hear me pontificate on any number of problems that have come between me and my self-imposed literary duties.

So, it will be different. Stylistically-speaking, that is. I have learned that even when I don’t know what I’m writing, the most important thing is to start writing. The whole thing sorts itself out in the end.

Didion is known for her high style, and in reading the essay “On Morality” from Slouching Towards Bethelehem, there are a few things that literally jump out and grab the reader by the throat. The thing to remember with Didion, though, is that it’s not the crazy, overwrought, overly violent image that grabs you — it’s something much more nuanced, something with the heft of surprise behind it. Her transitions are striking, but not in an overly obvious way. I can say with some surety that certain phrases that I may have blindly overlooked before now reach out to me, like the seemingly harmless “As it happens” or seemingly obvious “Let me tell you.” But these few words, these seemingly benign phrases, completely transform the whole thing when placed within the context of the piece.

Take the first sentence, for example:

“As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot.”

Which brings me to another point — the extended use of the comma. Some people have railed against comma use. I understand that. But Didion makes it work. So much, in fact, that her profuse comma usage has been permanently stamped in my brain as a Didion-esque hallmark, therefore having an obvious impact on the way I write. Did you count my commas? There are many. But not as many as Didion, who, in the first sentence of “On Morality,” uses three. In her first paragraph of four sentences, she uses nine commas.

This says something about the way the brain works. There is much to appreciate of well-polished sentences that punch to the gut with very little grammatical fanfare (here, Hemingway comes to mind), but at the same time, I am a sucker for things which replicate life — specifically, things that replicate how minds work, how memory works. In that, I feel that Didion has somehow bridged the gap between both worlds. Her prose often borders on over-the-top grammatical choices and a seemingly endless sequence, but because her words are — for lack of a better word — so damn well-chosen, it works.

And so there you have it: a well-polished thought with particularly placed words and carefully crafted phrases that bounce and lap into one another like small waves, carrying you through a sentence that deceptively seems to mirror how our brain might process a thought. You start with one thing, and three commas later, you’re in a wonderful (albeit unexpected) place. That’s part of the joy I take in reading Didion — despite having heard critics describe her writing as expected, guarded, or even boring — but then, my response would be this: you’re not reading close enough.

And my 19-year-old reader self, as much as I love her — well, she just didn’t pay enough attention at the time.

As it happens I am in Death Valley…

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

When I read that first sentence, I knew I was reading what, for me, was a perfect essay for the time.

I was especially struck by it because I’ve been wrestling with turning my thesis, which I finished this summer, into a relatively workable manuscript — with very little luck, I might add. The first part of the problem is “missing” stuff — the things that are necessary to form what will eventually be a book, but that aren’t written yet. But the other part, and mostly why that initial sentence knocked me beautifully breathless, is the fact that I don’t know how to end it. More specifically, I don’t know what the end is.

But neither does Didion, really. Or at least, that’s what she tells us. Endings are difficult things, often unclear, hiding themselves in the rather fuzzy haze of experience. And so instead of providing a clear one in her essay, she explores the meaning of an ending, and more importantly, the elusive nature of them.

That’s not to say that the essay is merely extrapolation on an abstract topic. It’s easy to assume, though, if you’ve only read that first sentence. For most writers, beginning an essay with a weighty generalization on something of an interior, philosophical idea is dicey territory — but Didion sets it up so that the narrator’s experience of coming of age in New York City illustrates the concept in a way that’s accessible.

And a coming of age essay is essentially what it is. The narrator recalls the moment she stepped off the train in NYC, telling us what immediately hit her, what still stuck with her, the scents and smells of the city, describing what would be “home” for the next eight years. There is no moment of textbook climax, wherein the narrator is faced with a horrible trial or devastating experience. Instead, the change that occurs is internal, making it all the more difficult to classify. There wasn’t some crucial, cliffhanging moment, she says. It was much different than that. One day, she thought one way; the next, she thought differently. It was all about the shift in thinking, really, or the evolution of beliefs — or, if you listen to how Didion tells it, the replacing of one with another. 

Can she pinpoint the moment when everything internally changed? No. But the ambiguity makes the essay all the more poignant — and it is poignant — because for many of us, these shifts of belief happen almost unknowingly. We wake up one morning, and the suddenness lies only in the realization that something inside of us changed.

One might argue (and Didion doesn’t really get into this, but for the moment, I will) that this type of subtle suddenness of the mind is more jarring — and more frightening, if you will — than a devastating outside experience. I say this because when some “external” crisis happens to you, part of its impact is partially absorbed by those around you. You have support system of people who, in some way or another, are there for you, who make life easier. When the change is internal, the resulting crisis of realization is all the more terrifying when you have to face it yourself.

With that, I leave you with the essay’s ending paragraph, which just pierces my heart with its gorgeous melancholy:

“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles ‘the Coast,’ but they seem a long time ago.”

Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” written in 1967, was published in her essay collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”

Today, I give you a phenomenal essay and thinkpiece on the intersection of Didion, Kanye and the self from writer friend Brian Oliu. In fact, it is way more than that, and the only way to know, truly, is to go read it on Flip Collective now:

“Kanye West And Our Days Of Magical Thinking”

This, of course, is a classic. When being introduced to Didion for the first time in my class on the essay, we started with the Preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem and none other than “On Keeping a Notebook.” Apparently, this seems to be an academic ritual of sorts, a common practice: a friend of mine, who teaches creative writing at a university, mentioned that he always starts his class with this essay.

For good reasons, of course. I remember feeling this sense of illumination, of self-discovery and validation, with each sentence of the essay – She wrote in notebooks, too? It thrilled me to read the words, “ I have felt compelled to write things down since was five years old.” It flooded me with wonder, excitement, and relief to know that this was a common thing amongst writers big and small, and I felt privileged even, as if I had unwittingly gained entry into this world I always knew I wanted to be part of, and because it was so unwitting, that somehow made it all the more authentic. 

Here are notes I made in an early reading of this essay a few days ago:

—  Use specifics to unite, e.g., “Estelles”

—  Estelle becomes window to understanding others

—  What specifics can I use to unite? Who am I uniting?

For those unfamiliar, the “Estelle” of the essay – which, I should note, becomes into “the Estelles” of us all, or at least many of us – is the “other woman” that’s a cause of separation. Didion, who is sitting at a bar in Wilmington, Delaware, hears a woman tell this to the bartender, who’s heard it before. But Didion’s attention is sharp, and her eye is drawn to another woman at the bar, or more accurately, “a girl”:

“She is talking, pointedly, not to the man beside her but to a cat lying in the triangle of sunlight cast through the open door. She is wearing a plaid silk dress from Peck & Peck, and the hem is coming down.
            Here is what it is: the girl has been on the Eastern Shore, and now she is going back to the city, leaving the man beside her, and all she can see ahead are the viscous summer sidewalks and the 3 a.m. long-distance calls that will make her lie awake and then sleep drugged through all the steaming mornings left in August (1960? 1961?). Because she must go directly from the train to lunch in New York, she wishes that she had a safety pin for the hem of the plaid silk dress, and she also wishes that she could forget about the hem and the lunch and stay in the cool bar that smells of disinfectant and malt and make friends with the woman in the crepe-de-Chine wrapper. She is afflicted by a little self-pity, and she wants to compare Estelles. That is what that was all about.”

But beyond that, and despite my diligent notes, the essay ended up highlighting something else for me entirely: the thought that the things we write about, or the things we choose to write about, or the things that choose to be written about say infinitely more about ourselves than they do about anything else. Most importantly, it defines who we are versus who we are not – Didion shows us this with her parallel of opposing worlds as personified by Mrs. Minnie S. Brooks and Mrs. Lou Fox.

In that sense, then, she seems to begin making an argument that notebooks are self-serving, self-indulgent things; essentially, a way to cope with the very fact that, as adults, we cannot be seen as self-indulgent, as it’s not acceptable. But this argument is lessened in the face of the fact, which is that all human beings, no matter what their stage of life, are self-indulgent:

“But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’”

With that aside, she seems to christen the notebook as a time machine of sorts, a way to “keep in touch” with our former selves, a vessel through which to channel them and, after time, even attempt to reacquaint ourselves with them:

“It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

The notebook, then, is a guard against that. And with that, I’ll finish with a few more of her lines:

            “It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”

Take a moment and try to remember: you’re a kid in grade school, and your teacher starts to talk about writing. There’s no doubt that she started you, first and foremost, with the sentence. I can hear the echoes in my head: “A sentence is a complete thought.” It’s easy how, as adults, we writers can forget that.

Personally, I have to admit, I’m a huge fan of the sentence fragment. I realize that it’s one of those things that’s not always acceptable – and to be honest, it’s not good to use them all the time – but when done in an artful way, I am certainly a supporter. I love that, when used effectively, it’s evocative of poetry, of song; it carries a certain music to it, creating a longing within the piece that may not have existed before.

But Didion – well, let’s just say she was paying attention in class when her teacher laid out the rules - “A sentence is a complete thought.” Indeed.

A few literary friends of mine were discussing Didion the other day, and so I’ll highlight something that stuck out to me. Peter Campion mentioned he was reading The White Album (I honestly don’t know how he gets through that collection in a night when I struggle to fit one essay in, but that’s the mark of maturity and ability, I guess) and wrote, “You could do a parody of Didion’s Hemingway tics and blurred paranoia,” using the following passage as an example:

“Those years we woke up in apartments and ate cereal. In a notebook from those years I find sentences like this: ‘180 calories with one cup of milk.’ To count calories gave a semblance of control. Those were the years that families were waking up and counting calories and eating cereal and walking into their lives and all truths in those years were touched with this one truth that cereal was in a box to be eaten and one morning the Menendez brothers woke up and slaughtered the parents who for years had fed them cereal. I have trouble remembering those years. It is if as if everything had milk spilled over it. Except there are sentences I wrote in notebooks. I was writing in notebooks, and I was, as much as the parents of the Menendez brothers, a parent who woke up in the morning and fed children cereal.”

In addition to the “Hemingway tics,” she’s prone to the long, glorious sentences punctuated with commas, semicolons, and emdashes – a less-flowery Nabokov, a style akin to what you’d find The New Yorker.

 In addition to the blogging end of things (it’s obviously getting me in the habit to write even more), it’s helping with the thinking. Most specifically: the way in which a writer processes material. If you think about it, this is the most crucial step – before pen is set to paper, before any words begin to form. You have to take in what you’re experiencing, what you’re seeing. And you have to really let it hit you, but at the same time, remain inquisitive. Form questions, form hypotheses. And remember this, this which may be the biggest thing for me to have to learn, narcissist that I am: remember that although the thing may be happening to you, the thing is bigger than just you, and is happening to everyone else, too. Keep the lens wide enough to see that. 

Last night, I read Didion’s essay “On Self-Respect,” a piece that she originally wrote for Vogue and later included in her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Though this is a shorter piece, one shouldn’t assume that it’s any less potent — or that it was any easier to write. In fact, it strikes me as more difficult, especially due to the fact that Didion is grappling with a pretty big idea.

Instead of merely trying to define and wax philosophical on the idea of self-respect, she provides illustrations of it through literature — my favorite, of course, being Jordan Baker from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. For me, this was one of the most crucial moments in the essay — and it strikes me as a calculated, structural decision on Didion’s part to place that paragraph directly in the middle of the piece, allowing the overall essay to hinge on what I think is her finest example (it appears in paragraph six out of twelve).

“Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.”

(You can read the full text of the essay on Mallary Tenore’s blog, “Word on the Street.”)