Joan Didion's America

"Didion voted for Goldwater in 1964. Since then, she has voted only twice," Michiko Kakutani wrote in a 1979 profile of Joan Didion for The New York Times. I was shocked when I first read these words. After all, Didion, now 75, is known for contributing to such liberal outlets as the New York Review of Books.

But reading her collected non-fiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, over the past few weeks, I've come to recognize that Didion's reluctance to participate in American Democracy, and her once affiliation with Barry Goldwater, stems not from apathy but from an inability to take things at face value. Didion does not simply report on the stories and ideas that her subjects convey to her; instead she reads between the lines to uncover the origins of her subjects' tales that they didn't even know about. Her style of journalism is about showing the misunderstandings between groups of people to illuminate the tensions in society. As such, the forty years of reporting covered in this collection give us a history of a post-War America that is broken due to Americans' refusal to do anything other than talk past one another.

The collection begins with Didion's first and most well-known book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This book is famous for giving readers a peek of the hippie lifestyle in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1960's. Didion goes beyond mere description, however, to explain why exactly the hippies seemed so foreign to non-Hippies. After interviewing many illustrious residents, from teenage runaways to drug dealers, she concludes "We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum." In other words, the hippies were lazing around not because of some rebellious streak, but because they were lost.

Didion next collection, The White Album, published more than ten years after her first, picks up where Slouching left off. The focus of this second book is to discuss the groups that were left out by the revolutions of the Sixties. She profiles a group of churchgoers who feel misplaced in a world that didn't deliver on the promises due to those with good behavior. In this world where the values seem to change on a daily basis, "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," Didion claims. By this she means that we rationalize our behavior and place ourselves in neat narratives to avoid dealing with actual issues:

"The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest."

Her next four books, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, and Political Fictions, give detailed examples of just the sort of stories that we say to ourselves and to those who agree with us at the expense of others. Didion shows how these generalizations translate into cultural isolation. In Salvador, she pitches the American foreign service officers at odds with the Salvadoreans. In Miami, she shows how the white Americans see the Cubans as foreign even though the Cubans have in many ways been more successful than their more native counterparts. This has led to a variety of willful misunderstandings including the belief on the Floridian side that all Cubans are Communists, and the belief on the Cuban side that JFK purposely lied about toppling Castro.

In her next two books, After Henry and Political Fictions, Didion takes on the political establishment. She paints a damning picture of how Washington insiders, including both politicians and the press, are completely out of touch with "the average American." Instead, Washington insiders basically battle each other over the airwaves at everyone else's expense. In a devastating portrayal of Ronald Reagan, Didion reduces him to nothing more than an actor playing the role of the president, like a puppet to powerful lobbying interests. She handles Whitewater and Clinton's affairs deftly, accusing both Democrats and Republicans of opportunism. She points out the irony of the leaders of a country where "the average age of first sexual intercourse ...[is] sixteen,"--a country where "six out of ten marriages...are likely to end in divorce...after engaging in extramarital sexual activity"-- calling for "full contrition" or even resignation from the president. Didion points out the hypocrisies in many political trends to emerge over the last decade, from Newt Gingrich's popularity to "compassionate conservatism."

Despite Didion's acuity about political issues, she is still best when writing about herself. She is famous these days for her memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, which centers on the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Where I Was From, Didion's most recent book included in this collection, gives her an opportunity to reflect on her life's work. She discusses her obsession with California by using many anecdotes about her own family's 200 year history in the United States. California is a land of cognitive dissonance. Californians value independence do-it-yourselfness as fiercely as they cling to government contracts for jobs in the defense and prison industries. Californians are as quick to call themselves "old-timers" for being in the state for five years as they are to shun immigrants. Though Didion only brings up these points explicitly in Where I Was From, it doesn't take much to realize that these are exactly the points she wants to make about America in all of her books. That we live in a land of contradictions, that we tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of it all.