We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: A Joan Didion Retrospective

You’ve seen the photo, the waifish woman, leaning against a Corvette, cigarette in one hand and the other wrapped around her body. She’s staring straight into the camera. It’s part of a series taken at her house in Malibu, and it’s the best of the bunch, sent around the world millions of times, attached to movie announcements and essays about leaving the city of one’s youth, her famous Packing List and more. It’s a striking photo, even if you don’t know the woman, Joan Didion, or her famously unflinching work; it’s even more striking if you do, starting with her second novel, Play It As It Lays, our latest Rediscovered Classic, first published in 1970. Told in flashbacks as the story cuts between Hollywood, Las Vegas and a film shoot in the Mojave Desert, Play It As It Lays is the indelible story of Maria Wyeth, a woman whose marriage and acting career are both failing. She’s become an alien in her own world, endlessly driving the freeways of Los Angeles (and cracking hard-boiled eggs on the steering wheel) because that’s the only true comfort she can find. Is her world the problem? Or is she? Her story unfurls in short, cinematic chapters like an Instagram feed; Play It As It Lays feels as though it could have been written last year. (And like Play It As It Lays, Didion’s other early novels, the fever dream of good and evil, truth and lies of A Book of Common Prayer, and her darkly comic, slightly romantic Democracy, read as if they were written only weeks ago

Didion famously said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Seen everywhere on social media not that long ago, the line comes from the titular essay in her second collection, The White Album; her often imitated but almost as always unmatched essay, Goodbye to All That, written as she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne traded New York for Los Angeles in the late 1960s, appears in her first, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The early essays cemented her status as a writer’s writer, a gimlet-eyed observer/reporter who always delivered gorgeous prose that captured the exact moment when before snaps into after. You can see the influence Hemingway has had on her prose style, and in case you missed it earlier this year, Didion’s most recent essay collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, includes “Last Words”, her essay about her life-long appreciation of Hemingway (and punctuation) and his impact on her work as well as her thoughts on the posthumous publications of A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden.

But it’s her 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking — a bestseller, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, adapted for the stage by David Hare and starring Vanessa Redgrave — that a majority of readers know Didion for and have made into a modern classic. It’s the story of her 40-year marriage to Dunne, his sudden death and the aftermath, and it’s an extraordinary portrait, candid and brave, of grief — and of life, shared and solo. What readers at the time didn’t know was that Dunne and Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo was in the hospital and ailing; she survived that experience but died unexpectedly in 2010. Blue Nights is a story that no parent ever wants to write, the eulogy for the child who predeceases her. As she did for her husband and their life together, she memorializes her daughter with love and melancholy truth.