Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to leave. The more than implicit observation in her axiom was not to present the world with an inspirational aphorism but to warn that the stories we tell ourselves in order to live may not be true and that we may not even care if they aren't true.
A friend of mine once quipped that every 20-something male journalism student wanted to be the next Hunter Thompson. My reply was that I'd rather be the next Joan Didion than the next Hunter Thompson, though I will, thankfully, be neither.
Didion was a master of the personal essay as a kind of cultural portraiture and while she has a variety of imitators what struck me about her writing was how impersonal her ostensibly personal writing often was. I was influenced by a number of figures from the New Journalism, especially Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion and the contrast between the two is on my mind. Wolfe was the writer who said "Look at me as I look at this." Didion looked at things and you saw she was telling you about things but even her personal writing had a remoteness to it, a remoteness I like. People have complained that her writing is cool or even downright cold, that there's an icy detachment combined with navel-gazing in her work. Yeah, often, and to the extent that solipsistic self-referential fixation has been a vice in the first-person industrial complex over the last twenty years Didion's work may have a few things to answer for.
Be that as it may, I have made it plain at this blog that I've drawn inspiration from Joan Didion and Jane Austen when I blog. Mark Driscoll's stage persona and shock jock approach in front of a camera did, I admit, spur me to embrace more tightly a literary style openly indebted to the two aforementioned women, but Didion was a touchstone for me since my journalism student days. I liked how when she wrote personal essays she was not herself the "story", what she was observing was the story. It can seem easy to forget that personal accounts are not journalism and in the realm of blogging it may be even easier to not recognize that personal accounts of what happened in this or that context doesn't constitute journalism. I wanted to be a journalist but I didn't end up being a professional journalist. By the time I graduated with my undergraduate degree in journalism I saw the job market was a wasteland for that skill set, especially for someone with a disability that precluded ever driving. But I did what I could and wrote a few things here and there.
One of the obituaries about Didion mentioned that two key themes in her work were entropy and grief. Well, if those two themes don't sum up a remarkably large swath of what happened in the rise and fall of Mars Hill I'm not sure you could get to the other themes without eventually getting to entropy and grief. Entropy I pray I have covered extravagantly where Mars Hill was concerned. Grief, grief I admit is something I try to keep at a somewhat Didion-like remove. But as I've slogged through Mike Cosper's The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill and have now come across news of the death of one of my literary heroes I, of course, think about Didion's observation that we tell ourselves stories in order to live and that these stories might not be the least bit true.
But we keep telling stories. Doubting the stories we live by doesn't mean we stop living by stories. Didion's observation about her fellow Americans was how often they sought a path to a new life, to reinvention, to living by a new story, to being the masters of their own stories and how these bids as self-mastering narrative rang hollow in light of the world they live in. If in Didion's essays there could be villains they are people who chose to believe a story against all earthly evidence that the story was credible. In the tragicomic ending of "Marrying Absurd" a woman tearfully says of her Las Vegas wedding it was as beautiful as she hoped and dreamed it would be. Didion leaves it to the reader to realize what a sad and miserable dream the dream had to be for such a Las Vegas wedding to have lived up to a young woman's dreams. Let the reader who has read "Marrying Absurd" understand.
It's one thing to say that we tell ourselves stories to keep on living as an indictment and another to offer some kind of notion of what stories we should live by and it has been at this point that Didion stopped being intriguing and inspiring. She could lead you up to the point where you could see how personal and collective stories could manipulate and deceive but not necessarily show you some other way to live. It may have been she saw the entropy and grief that saturates American life but alternatives? Not quite so much.
Many a story sold to us by story-tellers and sages offer the idea that we can start over or that we can live with ourselves because we're not "that" bad. Didion may have had a point in warning that these kinds of stories can be deceptive but the observation that we tell ourselves stories to live is the kind of profundity that is axiomatic. It is useful ... and I have certainly labored for years to examine the tears and busted seams in a great big story of a community but unlike Didion I hesitate at saying the whole fabric has something wrong with it, not because I'm not a dour Calvinist with a low anthropology but because I believe humans bear within them a divine spark that reveals they are made in the image of God. When someone we love dies one of those sparks is extinguished and we have to live with the loss of that spark's light in this world and in our lives.
One of her gifts as a writer was to let the absurd reveal itself rather than just tell you how absurd it was (that was the literary realm of Tom Wolfe). She saw no need to tell us that it was absurd that Michael Dukakis tried to position himself as relating to ordinary people while playing ball on a tarmac, the sheer absurdity of what was said and done could be reported. People who don't like her writing may get this point and still not like her work, but what I have learned from her journalism was that there is wisdom in letting the reader witness ridiculous through a written account of what happened rather than tell them to find something ridiculous. Many lesser writers and speakers want to force the recognition of the outrageous on you without so much as conveying the outrage; at her best Didion conveyed what was outrageous and let her readers respond.
I've written about a lot of stuff that I think is weird, crazy and wrong, but many times the weirdness is best left to speak for itself. I could have tried to ask why anyone at Mars Hill thought Justin Dean was a good fit for the church but Justin Dean shared how when he met Driscoll that Driscoll filled him with a sense of grand purpose unlike anything he'd felt before. Dean wrote: "I walked away from the first meeting with an unbelievable weight on my shoulders that never went away. A glorious purpose that I had never felt before. I knew God had orchestrated everything in my life up until then so that I could serve in that role." Within just a few years after he took on public relations management at Mars Hill the entire church had collapsed as a corporate entity. Dean presided over a slow but steady fire of public relations debacles small and great before the church doors shuttered.
What I picked up from Didion's work that I drew upon steadily was resisting the urge to tell people how to feel about the things I was observing. The axiom in writing is to show rather than tell. Far too much watchdog blogging tends to be more telling than showing and one of the perennial weaknesses of blogging can be that it simply doesn't even rise to the level of actual journalism with news pegs or, if it becomes journalism at all it's of a particularly yellow journalistic variety. It may be that there's a temptation for the "we" of writers to put ourselves into the stories we tell but we must remember that this is a tactic preferred by all sorts of demagogues and agitators and that if we want to play a role in not being part of that there's more than one way to tell a story. The stories we tell may be stories we tell, stories that are mediated by our lives and experiences but that don't always have to ultimately be about us while we're telling them.
She was a bit less strong when it came to observing that many times we want someone else to tell a story within which our lives can be a part. When Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories to live she could have included a caveat that very often we choose to live through the stories of others. We live vicariously through the stories our storytellers tell us, which can make it all the more shattering if the stories they have told us turn out to not be true.
Often she wrote about things and places and people she could keep at arm's length and even with the deaths of loved ones there was a kind of detachment she could sustain even in The Year of Magical Thinking. Detachment can be a sign of grief even when grief doesn't seem to be verbalized.
Maybe Didion can appeal to someone who's the sort of person who only knows how to weep in dreams ( to more people than that, of course). There's been an aspect to her writing where she seemed to be writing not about her own weeping but about the weeping she did in her dreams. For want of a better way to describe how she wrote that's how I'll describe it, for now. I haven't found the coldness or coolness of her writing off-putting, obviously--I've read it as a kind of deliberate detachment, even a literary persona. I have drawn from her writing as an influence on how I write about things, especially the church I used to be part of.
It's a story without murder as such but I can think back on how "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" may have sparked in me a little fire, an observation that a quest for a dramatic new life and the American way of re:invention can become for some a rationale for destroying lives in the name of, well, an ideal story ... right up to the point that the crimes get discovered or things don't go as planned.
One of my literary heroes has died but the puzzling (or maybe not puzzling) thing is that I'm not sure I feel anything about it. I mean, Joan Didion is one of a tiny handful of people from whom I got an autograph. If you wanted to try to define someone by whose autographs they have asked for and received then Wenatchee The Hatchet has autographs from Joan Didion and ... Bruce Campbell.
I don't know if that actually means anything, though.
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