Calif.’s next Joan Didion can sing
California’s next Joan Didion might be an improvement on the original. For one thing, she can sing. Phoebe Bridgers, a brilliant 26-year-old musician, isn’t just contending for four Grammy awards March 14. She is challenging the status of Didion, 86, as the most respected and quotable of California interpreters.
This challenge is long overdue. It’s been 40 years since New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani declared, “California belongs to Joan Didion.” While Didion’s writing still defines national perceptions of California, she moved to New York in 1988 and the most recent essay in her just-published anthology, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” is from 2000.
The challenge from Bridgers, a Pasadena kid now living in L.A., comes clothed in homage, not criticism. Bridgers frequently quotes Didion in media interviews and references her in songs about contemporary California anxieties.
“Didion reminds me of when I’m really dark and the way I think about the world,” Bridgers told The Fader. “It’s so hopeless. She just shamelessly goes there.”
Of course, Bridgers’ declarations of Didion love are also self-promotion. Didion is the rare California figure who achieved popular celebrity and membership in America’s intellectual elite. Bridgers, the sort of rock star who wears a Paris Review hat to her New Yorker interview, clearly wants both mainstream and elite credibility.
But the connection is much more than marketing. Bridgers’ poetic, indelible lyrics match the power and precision of Didion’s famous prose. Take Bridgers’ song, “I Know the End”:
“Over the coast, everyone’s convinced It’s a government drone or an alien spaceship
Either way, we’re not alone.
I’ll find a new place to be from” That last line — a reference to Didion’s California memoir, “Where I Was From” — made me wonder if there was finally a successor to the Didion throne. So, I re-read Didion’s work, while listening to Bridgers’ entire discography, including two acclaimed albums. The similarities are uncanny.
Both women bring a literary sensibility to pop forms. The musician shares the writer’s painstaking pattern of sweating every single syllable to create unforgettable lines — from “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (Didion) to “I’ve been playing dead my whole life” (Bridgers). Both believe in genre-bending — Didion in her unconventional novels “Play It as It Lays,” and “Democracy,” and Bridgers in songs that might start as ballads and end with heavy metal.
“I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting,” Bridgers told Apple Music.
Both are deft at using language to cut others. Didion called writing “an aggressive, hostile act” while Bridgers throws down lyrics like: “I’m gonna kill you/ If you don’t beat me to it.” And both are curious explorers of the everyday. Didion once explained, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m seeing” — from fear of driving the Carquinez Bridge to the aftermath of her husband’s death. Bridgers, in “Kyoto,” recounts “driving out to the suburbs to park at the Goodwill and stare at the chem trails.”
But perhaps what the women most share is California itself, and a sensibility that looks at the place through its dreams, its ghosts, its anxieties. Didion’s observation that “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension” shows up when Bridgers sings, “Like a wave that crashed and melted on the shore/Not even the burnouts are out here anymore,” or “I grew up here, ‘til it all went up in flames.”
Listening to Bridgers while re-reading Didion, as I’ve been doing, I found myself wondering if the musician, with her superior talents, shouldn’t aim higher than the author.
Didion, a Berkeley grad who focuses on surfaces, rarely gets to the emotional depths that Bridgers, who barely graduated high school, plumbs. Didion’s lack of empathy for some people she profiles is especially striking — her 2021 collection has an essay about a Gambler’s Anonymous meeting in Gardena where Didion flees the room rather than listen to an addict’s story. Bridgers’ work is rich in empathy, especially for those who, like the musician herself, struggle with depression.
But it is in her portrayal of California where Bridgers has the most room to improve on Didion. The author, relying on her comfortable Sacramento upbringing, offered a too-pessimistic view of a very white and rich California. If the successful musician is to avoid the same mistake, she’ll have to find light in the Didionesque darkness, and celebrate the hard-won gains among all our Chekhovian loss.