Joan Didion an antidote for nostalgia

In a more perfect world, I’d have a warehouse where I could hold onto all the books that have passed through my life.

If I had this warehouse, which would have white industrial floor-to-ceiling shelving and be magically maintained and dust-free, there would be probably seven feet of shelf space devoted to the works of Joan Didion.

Not that Didion has been that prolific a writer; her bibliography easily fits on a single page — five novels, 11 nonfiction books (and two more that cannibalize other books) and this new collection, Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s (edited by David L. Ulin, Library of America, $39.95). Considering that many of those books are slim and 2003’s Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11, is really an essay in pamphlet form, her collected

works shouldn’t take up more than, say, a couple of linear feet of shelf space.

But my theoretical problem is I’ve or obtained a lot of duplicate copies over the years. I’ve lent out or given away (same thing, isn’t it?) probably half a dozen copies each of Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album over the years; they are my go-to examples when I want to make some point about style.

And whenever I would discover that I was down a Didion it would nag at me. Eventually it would be replaced. (The exception is the copy of The Year of Magical Thinking that Paris chewed up when she was a puppy.)

I don’t know that Didion is one of my models, but I remember reading her in high school and preferring her work to the gonzo frenzy of Hunter S. Thompson or the baroque arch fulness of Tom Wolfe. She was more stiletto than machete or bolo knife or whatever it was those vine-swinging boys carried between their teeth.

Back before I’d heard the term literary journalism (or New Journalism, a term that feels as inauthentic as New Math or New Coke), Didion was my favorite writer of nonfiction. (Later I would admire her novels too, but for me she is primarily an essayist.)

Some things I learned from her: You cannot really report over the phone; it is at least as important to observe as it is to ask questions. You need to look at things, to see the disorder for yourself. For a writer, everything that is horrible is also gold. It is as important to be honest with yourself as it is with the reader.

The numbers are stacked in such a way that we often find ourselves peering back 50 years, to the end of a period some of us remember and some of us merely recognize as the ’60s. In some ways, reading Didion is a cure for nostalgia. It provides us with evidence that not everyone was soup-headed and stoned (or brainwashed and vicious) in those days when it really felt like, to paraphrase the subtitle of the documentary her nephew Griffin Dunne produced about her a couple of years ago, the center really could not hold.

I love Didion’s style; a coolness approaching iciness, a detached integrity, an almost brutal way of saying the thing that must be said, of communicating not only what happened but how it felt when it happened without indulging in sentimentality or hyperbole.

There is a calm empathy in her matter-of-fact work. She nailed things, like The Doors. She wrote about them in The

White Album:

It was six, seven o’clock of an early spring evening in 1968 and I was sitting on the cold vinyl floor of a sound studio on Sunset Boulevard, watching a band called The Doors record a rhythm track. On the whole my attention was only minimally engaged by the preoccupations of rock ’n’ roll bands … but The Doors were different, The Doors interested me. The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra. The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation. The Doors were the Norman Mailers of the Top 40, missionaries of apocalyptic sex.

That paragraph distills her refusal to make things about more (or less) than they are actually about. She is a lens, not a filter.

And I know all about her being a pop culture icon and how she influenced the way a lot of women (and some men) hold and carry themselves. That withering, intelligent gaze that wouldn’t — maybe couldn’t — look away. She’s the antidote for nostalgia.

I have a few more books to give away.

“What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace. Only one person I knew at Berkeley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time. A few of the people I knew at Berkeley killed themselves not long after … Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.”

— Joan Didion, “On the Morning After the Sixties,” originally published in The White Album