Women I Wish I Could've Been Friends With - Joan Didion Edition

I guess I should say women I wish I could be friends with considering Ms. Didion is still alive. But I'm not counting on being able to call her up and ask her to brunch anytime soon.

That being said, when I consider who I want to model my writing life after, Joan Didion has always been one of the first people to come to mind.

Back in the 60's, when most women were cinching their waists and marveling at the concept of microwaveable dinners, Joan Didion was traveling and writing and recording the world as she saw it. The essays she wrote became a commentary on an entire culture and she is respected as one of the most successful, poignant, personal writers of literary journalism of our time.

I've always felt a kind of kindred spirit in her. Not simply because she writes non-fiction, but also because of why she writes. In her essay, "On Keeping a Notebook," Didion said "keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss." And so it is. She writes, and I write, in a vain attempt to hold onto everything. To preserve the things we can't touch and save. Something about her work gave me permission to want to write something other than a novel. Because real people and real moments, those are stories too.

After my dad died, I kept subconsciously looking for someone or something that would make me feel like I was not the only person in the entire world who had ever been swallowed whole by grief. Obviously I wasn't, but everything I read, everyone I talked to who said "I'm so sorry for your loss" never even began to touch on the depth of that type of sadness. It was so isolating - a fact that actually compounded the pain. Not only did no one know how I felt, but after about 3 weeks or so, people generally tended to expect me to be fine. Pick myself up, go back to work, make dinner, take a shower, take movies back to Redbox on time. It was an unspoken statue of limitations on expressing the fact that I was still so fucking sad. If I was going to cry, I needed to take that shit back inside and shut the door. It was time to be okay now.

But I wasn't. And honestly, I'm still not.



It wasn't until a few months ago when I read The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion's memoir written after the death of her husband and right before the death of her daughter that I FINALLY felt like maybe there was someone else out there that got it. Her book offered no apologies or condolences. There were no images of the typical grieving widow. Instead, Didion offered up tiny, poignant details that I immediately understood and identified with.

In reading it, I was suddenly in the middle of a conversation with someone who knew. Who knew the dangers of driving down the wrong road, of looking at a piece of handwriting, or being aware of just the right time of day, lest the suffocating grief decide to show up and buckle your knees in the middle of a perfectly normal Sunday afternoon.

That knowing has made the pain substantially less. And it's not the first time in my life that stories have saved me.

Joan with her husband and daughter for Vogue magazine

That's the power of effective writing. The power of telling a story. It's the ability to connect with people, across time and distance and experience. I will never know her, but she helped me to navigate some of the most profound pain of my life. She also gifted me a picture of a decade I'll never know, but feel like I do, because of work like hers.

They say that the universe is made of stories, not atoms. And I believe that.

It's what I've learned from reading her work, over and over again. And what I hope to give to other people so long as I don't develop debilitating carpal tunnel.

xo.