Skip to main content
Read page text
page 26
BRICK 24 but also what was happening to her. This is the kind of realism I am after. Apostropheless. Unrelenting. Death wakes us to our lives. To the shimmer of our style. Our minds grope in a dark soup punctuated by sensations we respond to and attempt to make meaning from. Here is where Woolf and Didion meet. The attempt to align the inside and out. I could suddenly see that Didion had been doing this all along. Trying to understand her place in family, national, and political narratives. I could see how she had doggedly pursued herself from the early essays (Am I a good girl? Where am I from? What has my ancestry given me, the ground under my feet?) right up to The Year of Magical Thinking, a book I have read countless times since its publication in 2005 and which spurred me to reread and reassess everything, right from the beginning. What a mind, working every second to document against the abyss. 7. If I call up the image of a confident writer, Didion is right at the top, along with a bevy of women born in the early 1930s. She is a contemporary of Plath, as I have said, but she’s also a contemporary of Susan Sontag, Janet Malcolm, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Gloria Steinem, Edna O’Brien, Yoko Ono, Caryl Churchill, Monique Wittig, June Jordan, and Alice Munro, each a strong, seemingly confident woman with a relationship to power and patriarchy, on an upriver journey to a self and style of her own. I miss this generation of women, which is likely why I soaked up Didion’s essays in the recently published Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Especially the glimpses of a young Didion coming to writing. Three I ’s slash vertically, not horizontally, across the opening page of “Why I Write,” a title Didion tells us she stole from George Orwell. That I, I, I really amplifies the insistence on the expansiveness of the project of self-creation, but, as Hilton Als notes, creation by self-discipline not self-repression. She was a Republican, in the manner of the selfmade men of the West. I sense her eyeing me now, suspiciously (always a feature of my experience reading her), facing off at sundown, a slender John Wayne in a linen sundress. I sense she would not be amused by my observations. Hers is the dream of unbiased criticism. The dream of neutrality and bootstrap. She has the nose, and the rigour, of a newsman; the instincts and flair of an entertainer. She is a beloved, hip aunt and a Maileresque daddy exhaling a vision and holding it aloft, like a billboard hovering over a twelve-lane freeway blinking from a time that appeared to be less dire, if not any less complicated. 8. “I had, and have, no talent for it, no feel for the rhythms of the short story,” Didion writes in “Telling Stories,” equating here the form of short-fiction writing with the quaint and claustrophobic kind of writing that offers only a window on the world, unlike the novel, which is actually the world. On the other hand, she suggests later that short-story writers might better know their own minds. An important distinction is being made. It seems to do with genre, but it’s more about style, which appears to be the quality or character of thought:
page 27
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.

Page Text

View plaintext

BRICK

24

but also what was happening to her. This is the kind of realism I am after. Apostropheless. Unrelenting.

Death wakes us to our lives. To the shimmer of our style. Our minds grope in a dark soup punctuated by sensations we respond to and attempt to make meaning from. Here is where Woolf and Didion meet. The attempt to align the inside and out.

I could suddenly see that Didion had been doing this all along. Trying to understand her place in family, national, and political narratives. I could see how she had doggedly pursued herself from the early essays (Am I a good girl? Where am I from? What has my ancestry given me, the ground under my feet?) right up to The Year of Magical Thinking, a book I have read countless times since its publication in 2005 and which spurred me to reread and reassess everything, right from the beginning.

What a mind, working every second to document against the abyss.

7. If I call up the image of a confident writer, Didion is right at the top, along with a bevy of women born in the early 1930s. She is a contemporary of Plath, as I have said, but she’s also a contemporary of Susan Sontag, Janet Malcolm, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Gloria Steinem, Edna O’Brien, Yoko Ono, Caryl Churchill, Monique Wittig, June Jordan, and Alice Munro, each a strong, seemingly confident woman with a relationship to power and patriarchy, on an upriver journey to a self and style of her own.

I miss this generation of women, which is likely why I soaked up Didion’s essays in the recently published Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Especially the glimpses of a young Didion coming to writing. Three I ’s slash vertically, not horizontally, across the opening page of “Why I Write,” a title Didion tells us she stole from George Orwell. That I, I, I really amplifies the insistence on the expansiveness of the project of self-creation, but, as Hilton Als notes, creation by self-discipline not self-repression.

She was a Republican, in the manner of the selfmade men of the West. I sense her eyeing me now, suspiciously (always a feature of my experience reading her), facing off at sundown, a slender John Wayne in a linen sundress. I sense she would not be amused by my observations. Hers is the dream of unbiased criticism. The dream of neutrality and bootstrap. She has the nose, and the rigour, of a newsman; the instincts and flair of an entertainer. She is a beloved, hip aunt and a Maileresque daddy exhaling a vision and holding it aloft, like a billboard hovering over a twelve-lane freeway blinking from a time that appeared to be less dire, if not any less complicated.

8. “I had, and have, no talent for it, no feel for the rhythms of the short story,” Didion writes in “Telling Stories,” equating here the form of short-fiction writing with the quaint and claustrophobic kind of writing that offers only a window on the world, unlike the novel, which is actually the world. On the other hand, she suggests later that short-story writers might better know their own minds.

An important distinction is being made. It seems to do with genre, but it’s more about style, which appears to be the quality or character of thought:

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content