SINA QUEYRAS
25
what is “on” the mind rather than what is “in.” Here again comes the stillness. Room for images to accumulate around her. Ideas to take root.
9. I don’t read enough about how young women come to writing. How we offer ourselves up to workshops, universities, and master classes to try to glean some way of being okay with ourselves, both inside (mental preparedness and craft) and out (financially and socially). We come, it seems to me, not necessarily to acquire skills but to hone those we have. And to find our kin. We are rarely welcomed. Maybe we shouldn’t be is a thought that comes to me when reading Didion; it’s a thought that smacks of another era. The sense of wonder and alienation from the powerful female figures I grew up with (my mother was also born in the early 1930s), who often seemed to hold young women at such a distance, as if expecting us to succumb.
Looking at Didion’s young self, we see the lonely origins of the woman writer. Of her experience as a junior at Berkeley taking Mark Schorer’s prose workshop, she observes: “It seemed increasingly clear to me that I had no future.” She spends hours searching for what she might wear to the prose workshop and ends up selecting a “dirty raincoat,” hoping she might “appear invisible” in it. She sits, a silent figure in the room.
10. Joan, if you can. Which is to claim intimacy. I was never temperamentally attuned to the young Didion. I always felt, in her presence, like a bit of a clown with my heart in my mouth. Earnestness is the enemy of style.
Still, I could never look away. And I think if I had encountered Didion at any point in her life, sitting at a table next to me in a restaurant, for example, or across the aisle on a plane, I would have recognized her immediately, even if she never looked up, never made eye contact, never so much as blinked. This withholding, it turns out, is what interests me, her awareness of writing as she is writing. Poise. Self-possession. A sense—how to say this artfully—that she is not here to play, but also that she has not come with answers.
In fact, I think I sat next to her once, in a workshop. She was young. Ambitious. In her raincoat. Patient beyond expectation. But then suddenly, exasperated at all the flailing, she took a penknife out of her pocket and stabbed the air. Just like that, the room emptied of all the clutter. I hadn’t even known it was there. I hadn’t seen a window. I hadn’t even thought of the view.