In the wake of her award winning book The Year of Magical Thinking, I realized that I had never read anything by Joan Didion. This is odd because the essay is one of my particularly favorite forms of writing and she is well known for her essays. A few months ago I finally got around to ordering a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and then it sat downstairs as I dealt with other books I could not resist. A few days ago I picked it up and I have been slowly reading (savoring) it ever since.

This lady really can write.

The only reason anyone would be fascinated by these essays is the writing. A murder in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" - is it so different from anything else we read about in the news today? Not really, not much, and yet the language draws you in; makes it so much more relevant. "Of course she came from somewhere else," writes Didion, "came off the prairie in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio, for this is a Southern California story." And just like that the reader understands something about this woman, this killer. We have seen a glimpse of something that Didion was able to show us and that makes us keep reading.

I wanted to know what else Didion understood.

It's such a joy to read a smart writer, and even more so when she isn't afraid to be smart. Didion reminds me of Jenny Diski that way - they both have a wry way of looking at the world and no concerns about telling it like it is. Joan Baez "was a personality before she was entirely a person, and like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be." Echoes of our own celebrity culture today, of Britney, Lindsey, and all the others. Of course Joan Baez never wandered around without her underwear on but still - "a personality before she was entirely a person" is pitch perfect and makes you wonder, in retrospect, how much of the myth was really Joan Baez and how much was what everyone else decided was Joan Baez.

When I read this kind of writing it always makes me want to be more honest; to stop playing at story and thinking too much and just write. I try to drum into my head the importance of truth in writing - it seems obvious, even in fiction, but you can't ignore that little voice that wonders what the reader wants; irregardless of what you have to say. Is this character sympathetic enough, this moment intense enough, this conversation sincere enough? Is it what they want to read?

Didion did not worry about such things of course. Her thoughts on Bethlehem from an interview at the Guardian a couple of years ago:

I ask if it felt like career-making stuff as she wrote it. "No. I was paying the rent. It wasn't until Henry Robbins, who was my editor at Farrar Straus, wanted to bring out a collection of pieces ... I thought it was a terrible idea because I thought they would all be repetitive." But she did put them together, "and it was sort of well received. But I still have no sense, no sense of ... they literally were pieces that were taken against a deadline, against a need for money."

Don't think about it too much maybe - not about the audience anyway. Think about the writing but not about the rest. Let the rest just happen because the writing is the most important thing. "We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and screamed, forget who we were."

I still remember and that's why I need to write it now. For me, and maybe only for me, I need to write while I still remember.

(Post title from "on Keeping a Notebook" by Didion. Picture from Alexis Anne MacKenzie; see post at Endicott Studio to learn more about this amazing artist. The picture, to me, was Didion creating a world.)