I first became aware of Joan Didion in the mid-70s: she was another author who appeared in Tom Wolfe's "New Journalism" anthology. I'm not sure that the word "enjoyed" can be applied to her chapter in the book about San Francisco in early 1967, but I found it very enlightening in historical terms, having been slightly too young to have read about that period when it occurred in real time.
Shortly after, I found her collection of articles, "Slouching towards Jerusalem": this definitely was enlightening. Of all the articles, the most interesting was "On keeping a notebook", written in 1966 but referring to events that happened a few years earlier. This was a most personal article and at the time this was exactly the sort of material that I was looking for.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.
Whilst I did not sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice at the age of seventeen, I can very much appreciate the sentiment, especially about the twenty-three-year-old me. Whilst I never kept a notebook or a journal, I used to be a copious letter writer. Unfortunately, what I remember as hundreds of letters that I wrote before about 1985 are lost; sometime in the mid-80s, I started writing letters via a computer and so I have copies of all those letters. Then I moved on to blogging, which in many ways is simply the modern variant of a journal, except that here, blogs have a start, a middle and an end. They are not random jottings but are about something.
In the early 80s, I bought a copy of her latest book (as it was then), "The white album". This collection piqued my interest less: there was a chapter about Jim Morrison and the Doors and there was another chapter containing some information about amitryptiline, but otherwise I was left untouched. I bought a copy of one of her novels (I think this was "River Run") in the second-hand bookshop in Rehovot that I used to frequent, but I found this opaque.
Still, I found Joan to be a very intriguing person. I never had a clear mental picture of what she looked like so here is one from 1972.
Joan Didion in Vogue in 1972. Photograph: Henry Clarke/Condé Nast/Shutterstock
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