An American Girl

Joan Didion’s Conservatism, Skepticism, and Uncanny Insight

“By the time I reached Boston,” Joan Didion observes in The White Album, “I knew that I had never before heard and would possibly never hear America singing at precisely this pitch: ethereal, speedy, an angel choir on Dexamyl.”¹ It is as if Didion foresaw, from the throes of an extensive publicity tour for her fourth book, how I too would feel upon reaching Boston. Momentarily, I had the peace of passing through—a visiting student at Harvard College, just watching the colors change, the grass ripple, the sunlight dapple. And then there was the low tone, foreboding, of what seemed to have overnight become a toss-up presidential race with bad options on both sides. For in Boston, the ostensible birthplace of America, Didion and I both found ourselves concerned about America—and disoriented by it. In 1977, Didion wrote that the country seemed a “projection on air, a kind of hologram, an invisible grid of image and opinion and electronic impulse.” Her affective state suffered greatly in this period: “I gravitated to the random. I swung with the nonconsequential...I lost track of information. I was blitzed by opinion.”² Indeed, this is our common condition. A few weeks ago, on the phone with my father, I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t find the words to explain why. Why? Didion herself declares, “had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write.”³ Her writing, I argue, is more relevant, more strikingly alive, than ever before. And anyone who doesn’t know the answers will always have needed to read it.

I came to Cambridge to get away from California. But having spent three years steeping in Didion’s work, attending her alma mater, reading her blue books from a Henry James class in the Bancroft Library archives, and writing her into every essay I could, I found that this particular Californian lingered in my mind. She is also severely underread at Harvard. Born in Sacramento in 1934, Didion was raised as a “conservative California Republican” who grew up around people “interested in low taxes, a balanced budget, and a limited government…[that] had no business tinkering with the private or cultural life of its citizens.”⁴ She studied English at the University of California, Berkeley, graduated in 1956, and then moved to New York to compose captions for Vogue. Her first novel, Run River (1963), written out of homesickness, depicts a waning California family’s experience in a changing landscape—and sets the tone for all of her later fiction. Developing a theme of inherent fictitiousness, brokenness and manipulation, within society, she remarked that “you could be told or you could tell the comfortable loving fictions.” Developing her own image as a writer, a woman known by many and understood by none, she described that “there existed between her and other women a vacuum in which…connections broke.”⁵

To be clear, her fiction declines significantly in quality as her career goes on. A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) are easily her worst works (befuddled, convoluted, too many sentences the length of a paperclip, the same stony-faced men, alcoholism, suspect narrators, so on and so forth). Of The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion said even she “couldn’t remember the plot.”⁶ In contrast, her first two novels, Run River (1963) and Play It As It Lays (1970), are some of her best. Here I should note that contemporary readers of Didion must not spin Didion as just anything they want: that is, she cannot be interpreted as merely cool, or trendy, or, God forbid, progressive. Although you have almost certainly encountered Play It As It Lays in its co-opted, Instagram-friendly form—tucked under the elbow of one or two liberal white women who consider themselves the chicest breed of literate—the novel remains one of the most fundamentally and profoundly anti-abortion works ever written, detailing in visceral specificity the devastating consequences of actress Maria Wyeth’s illegal procedure. (The year after it was published, 1964, Didion “voted, ardently, for Barry Goldwater,” and commented in 2001, “had Goldwater remained the same age and continued running, I would have voted for him in every election thereafter.”)⁷

In the end, two essay collections—Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979)—definitively announced Didion’s arrival as a writer who saw people for what they were, and considered them as such. This writer leveled a cool gaze at drug-addicted San Franciscans, insular politicians, Hollywood executives, policemen, communists, Newport Beach residents, herself, and everyone in between, with an uncanny sense for societal anomie and a deep suspicion of institutions, establishments, and societies. She understood that “we would all like to ‘believe’ in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves,”⁸ but refused to ignore our “workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another.”⁹ Delusion in all its variants may well be the most mortal of sins for Didion; forthrightness regarding American corruption and decline may well be the apotheosis of virtue. Though these essays were published almost sixty years ago, she still seems to speak to us directly, right here, right now.

“Right now” is not so far from what Didion chronicles in “The White Album,” an essay on the feeling of a fraying system, of the “center not holding”¹⁰ in the chaos of the Sixties: “There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable…I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”¹¹ Later, she writes how “a demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” even as everyone “joined in a rather festive camaraderie, a shared jargon, a shared sense of moment…aglow with the prospect of problems to be ‘addressed,’ plans to be ‘implemented.’”¹² That such a characterization of the country still feels true testifies the appropriateness of a doubtful glance toward those who have been running the country, and those who believe they have done good work. This dissatisfaction with the establishment, and cynicism regarding politicians, experts, and organizers, is a constant of Didion’s writing.

But another obvious constant of Didion’s career is her obsession with narrative and opinion—specifically, her horror at the fragility of narrative, and the ease with which opinion is stated and restated. She is fearful of the “conviction that something can be made out of nothing,” and considers it “one of the few narratives in which everyone participates.”¹³ She is paranoid about who is really telling the story: at one point, she specifically notes that “the narrative is made up of many…understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic storyline.”¹⁴ The narrator in Democracy (1984) is “trained to distrust other people’s versions.” In a 1991 essay on the Central Park Five, Didion attacks the usage of “minimal physical evidence” opening the case for “celebrated New York criminal lawyers,” and condemns the case’s “sentimentalization of experience,” its “emphasis on perceived refinements of character and manner and taste,” suggesting “not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character.”¹⁵ This skepticism, though it resists an explicit “Conservative” label, is the mark of Didion’s conservatism, which remains consistent, almost transcendent, relative to partisan divides. Even after she became the first registered Democrat in her family (only due to having been “shocked and…personally offended by the enthusiasm with which California Republicans who had jettisoned an authentic conservative [Goldwater] were rushing to embrace Ronald Reagan”), she refused to take a “markedly different view on any issue.”¹⁶ Whether she outwardly belonged to one party or another doesn’t matter all that much, for her perspective remained unchanged. In a 2001 interview titled “Joan Didion Takes on the Political Establishment,” she told The Harvard Crimson that the “political class” was made of “people who don’t have a very deep commitment to the rest of the country; in fact, they have none at all.”¹⁷

If you were thinking that Didion’s work is no more than the blathering of an obnoxiously Californian Byron, you may have a point. She is transparently gloomy, self-alienating, self-medicating, cynical, and occasionally nostalgic, with an undoubtedly bleak vision of the future. And she remains magnetic, dynamic, an ambitious writer, an exposing thinker, and a lauded innovator in the field of New Journalism. I’ve loved her for years now, not in the way you love a friend, but in the way you love a window—for showing you what the world is, and within it, who you are. She saw through—and straight to—the worst of America, its confusion, humorlessness, its disturbing tendency towards falsification. A worse America is now upon us, and I have no desire to recount its disasters in detail. Yet Didion still provides us a lens through which the world becomes clearer than it ever was, obvious for what it is, though hardly more beautiful. Then again: what could be more beautiful than the moment at the window when the lightning flashes in the night, when you see things with perfect acuity, and nothing else—the moment before it all goes dark again?

JEANNE GUYON

A version of this article originally appeared in Help Wanted, the October 2024 print issue of the Salient.

1. “On the Road,” 1977

2. “On the Road,” 1977

3. “Why I Write,” 1976

4. Political Fictions, 2001

5. Run River, 1963

6. “In One of Her Last Interviews, Joan Didion Talks to Hari Kunzru About Loss, Blue Nights, and Giving Up the Yellow Corvette,” Lit Hub, 2022

7. Political Fictions, 2001

8. “On Morality,” 1965

9. “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,” 1967

10. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” 1967

11. “The White Album,” 1968-1978

12. “The White Album,” 1968-1978

13. “LA Noir,” 1989

14. “Insider Baseball,” 1988

15. “Sentimental Journeys,” 1991

16. Political Fictions, 2001

17. “Joan Didion Takes on the Political Establishment,” The Harvard Crimson, 2001