A Small Tribute to Joan Didion

Photo: AP photo.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, were the first words to fly off the page in Joan Didion’s 1979 collection of essays The White Album. Words holding an eternal truth, now forever intertwined with the writer who penned them to paper.

More seldomly quoted, however, are the words that complete the paragraph.

…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

No one can know the nature of her actual existence than Didion herself, but for any onlooker – it did seem like the writer had a special way of taking control over her own narrative line. Even when destiny held her pen, steering in another direction than Didion would ever have wanted, with the death of her husband, she found the power to steer it back in and take back control over her own narrative with The Year of Magical Thinking, however devastating. She, indeed, told her story in order to continue living.

For writers, to tell ourselves stories and to tell our stories through writing, are almost the same thing, but not exactly. For writers, it is not enough to tell the stories to ourselves, their power lay in their visibility to the world. However many prior edits, it’s only then they become blocks of solid. A way forward. But the pen also serve a vessel for clarity, or in Didion’s own words:

– I don't know what I think until I write it down.

But Didion didn’t just pen experiences, she had a Voice – and despite her frail appearance, her voice echoed far and wide. Didion will not just remembered as a female pioneer within her field, but as someone who put as much a stamp on society and culture, as she so eloquently described parts the human existence.

Even from an early essay in Vogue we can see the power of her pen:

– Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. (Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power)

And with lost innocence, so a writer’s life truly begin.

Words: Lene Haugerud