{"id":39461,"date":"2012-10-04T15:01:34","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T19:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=39461"},"modified":"2019-08-14T12:21:14","modified_gmt":"2019-08-14T16:21:14","slug":"meeting-joan-didion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/04\/meeting-joan-didion\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting Joan Didion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Each Sunday, we would walk down Lexington together, the conversation taking the tempo of our steps: slow, meditative, purposeful. She\u2019d always be in immediate need of a coffee, so we would head for our caf\u00e9. The one on Seventy-something, a fifteen-minute walk from her place. We would never spend too much time in her apartment beforehand. I would go up to get her, maybe sit in her kitchen for five minutes while she got her things together, keys jangling, and we\u2019d leave. I would try to take in the walls of books, visually inhaling the pillows collected over years and continents, and those curtains\u2014thick buttery beige, like icing. Framed photographs from the seventies\u2014the nuclear family\u2014lining the bookcases, soaked in that sunny filter of the era, then sun-soaked again by the morning light.<\/p>\n

At the caf\u00e9, we\u2019d speak of her writing, about what she was working on, what movies we\u2019d each recently seen and if they were any good. If we\u2019d spotted any celebrities downtown, we would share what they\u2019d been wearing and she would tell me her dreams. We would sometimes order two scoops of vanilla ice cream to share, and she\u2019d urge me to finish the last bite. If conversation lagged, I might tell her I felt a West Coast phase coming on.<\/p>\n

She would read my writing and tell me what was good and what wasn\u2019t (she\u2019d never say anything like she \u201csaw great potential\u201d in me\u2014nothing like that, nothing that might threaten eyes to roll). She\u2019d advise me as a professional equal and as a child, which is exactly how I would feel sitting across from her, two times her size and one-third her age, her books overstuffing my backpack.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t think in terms of suddenly making it,\u201d she would tell me, remembering when Play It as It Lays<\/em> first came out. \u201cYou think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you\u2019re writing, and if it doesn\u2019t seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can\u2019t imagine that moment when it suddenly will.\u201d I would nod. \u201cGradually,\u201d she\u2019d add, \u201cgradually you gain that confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

She wouldn\u2019t always be nice to me. She might be in a foul mood and take it out on me a bit, but then she would always be fair. That\u2019s how I\u2019d know she was taking me seriously. I would be aware then, I wouldn\u2019t have to wait until I was older to recognize, that this acknowledgment, this leveling, was more valuable than anything else.<\/p>\n

Her secrets would be my secrets, and mine hers\u2014in so much as people share their secrets. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether<\/em>, she\u2019d say knowingly, eyeing the stacks of journals overflowing my lap, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.<\/em> I would shrug and scribble a note or two.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d learn her way of being, how she took up space. How she liked her eggs, where she\u2019d sniff after words and what that meant, which was her favorite linen dress. And I\u2019d learn to sketch maps of her intellectual processes. I suppose she would learn mine as well. She had many friends, of course, so it wouldn\u2019t be like I was giving her something to do. She would meet with me for some other reason, one that would never be entirely clear to me. Years later, I would still wonder.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I finished Blue Nights<\/em>, I exhaled deeply, knowing things were now different. I\u2019d started it the day before, a copy I\u2019d happened upon, and while I knew there was other writing of hers I\u2019d yet to read to be sure of it, I nevertheless knew I\u2019d tasted something true. The sense of a new era overwhelmed me. Loss, memory, loss, memory. That was my mantra at the time, and Didion sang it back to me more clearly and more devastatingly than I\u2019d known it could be sung. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.<\/em><\/p>\n

At the same time, she was mighty. And brutally funny, of course. She conveyed the humor of regret as effortlessly as its intransigence. The admission of feeling lost when you\u2019re told you shouldn\u2019t (when caring for a child, for one). The shameful desire that things, that people you love, be different. The comical and terrifying process of aging, in which you\u2019re asked to do things like swallow tiny cameras\u2014equal parts tragedy and farce. In the end I did swallow the very little camera, and the very little camera transmitted the desired images, which did not demonstrate what was causing the bleed but did demonstrate that with sufficient sedation anyone could swallow a very little camera<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There were many moments throughout Blue Nights<\/em> when normally I\u2019d have underlined a particularly stirring sentence or passage that made me smile or my eyes well. But for some reason, I hadn\u2019t used a pen at all, a complete departure from the norm. I didn\u2019t want to pause reading long enough to assist my future memory by leaving its trail.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when I started fantasizing about our meetings. Imagining her walking New York alone, as I did, I craved the synthesis of a loving parent and a fiercely objective mentor. I wanted to be a professional. I wanted to be taken care of.<\/p>\n

Days after reading Blue Nights<\/em> I found myself at La Guardia waiting to fly to Atlanta for my grandmother\u2019s funeral. She\u2019d been ninety-one and was my last living grandparent, and the final act of a two-year procession of eldest generation leave-taking. The living link to the South and an older, vastly different way of life were no longer. What had always been a vague interest in family history intensified to a fascination.<\/p>\n

At the gate I checked my e-mail and saw a message from my friend Emily inviting me to a public interview with Joan Didion the next month. She knew nothing of my recent fantasies, so this invitation felt like magic. The event, organized by Emily\u2019s sister, ended in a private reception, and we were invited.<\/p>\n

It was a sign, of course. I would meet Joan Didion. I would introduce myself, give her my phone number, and say, Joan Didion, I would like to take you out to coffee. Please give me a call if that prospect at all intrigues you. Just like that. She would call, weeks later after I\u2019d given up on it all, and we would meet. She\u2019d think I was sort of silly but bold and would give me a chance accordingly (as in the movies). She would become my mentor. My friend.<\/p>\n

She would become my grandmother, and I would become her daughter\u2014but that wasn\u2019t clear to me until later. That much only revealed itself after it became clear that I\u2019d be unable, in the end, to make it to the event. Unable to go to the private reception. Crying over this impossible twist of fate, it occurred to me: this\u2014this is bigger than Joan Didion.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d already grieved for my grandparents ten years earlier, when they were very much alive. They were moving to an assisted-living apartment building and the magical home I\u2019d grown up visiting twice a year\u2014the one where I\u2019d imagined I\u2019d bring friends, my future husband even (with the skewed sense of time and mortality in which a lucky thirteen-year-old exists)\u2014was sold, the brick painted a hideous white. I\u2019d mourned my thirteen-year-old fantasy of the everlastingly bustling home and only returned to the now-white house ten years later with my boyfriend of the time, just to drive by, just to have a look.<\/p>\n

Looking out at the Atlanta skyline from their new apartment, unfurnished and sterile, I was surprised at thirteen when my eyes welled with tears. Soon I would learn to say loud hellos to each small, often stooped person I passed in the hall; soon I\u2019d become used to eating at six P.M.<\/small> sharp; and I would laugh when my grandfather would refer to the others as \u201cthe old fogies,\u201d always winkingly distinguishing himself from those who were supposed<\/em> to be there. When he died two years to the week before my grandmother, the unreality of it all made the change hard to feel. I continued to visit my grandmother at Lenbrook but was less and less able to connect to her. She drifted further away. She had always operated out of that Southern feminine toughness that left you well fed and feeling her fierce loyalty in place of that grandmotherly softness you see on TV. (In one spontaneous demonstration of physical affection, she would almost yell, \u201cDo you know what love is and when you\u2019re getting some of it?!\u201d punctuating each word with a slap to your thigh.) Once I was old enough to take her on for who she was, bypassing shyness to know the woman behind the hard-to-read crustiness, she\u2019d been getting older too.<\/p>\n

Months after her funeral, my mother, aunt, and I spent a weekend cleaning out the apartment to be sold. Early one morning, a woman out walking in the hall said hello as she passed and offered, dreamily and without invitation, that unexplained elderly clairvoyance, to pray for us.<\/p>\n

And so, I would not meet Joan Didion. Not in that magical way. I would not be a prodigy. I was not a genius, it turned out, just as David Rieff\u2014son of Susan Sontag, an epithet I\u2019m sure he\u2019d rather not see enclosed in dashes, rather not, perhaps, see at all\u2014had suggested while speaking, not unkindly, to a group of young writers of which I was one. It was likely, as he put it, that none of us were geniuses (and with such a mother, these realizations must come all the faster and more brutally). I would, instead, slowly practice and progress as normal people do until, if lucky, I became good. A good writer. And would I be happy then?<\/p>\n

A mother doesn\u2019t have to be perfect, according to D. W. Winnicott, nor does she even have to be great\u2014she only has to be a \u201cgood-enough mother\u201d for her child to learn to trust the stability of the ordinary world. Blue Nights<\/em> was a holding environment, a place I could feel taken care of and, still, a place alive with possibility. But would it be good enough to be a good-enough writer?<\/p>\n

But I do know that there is one kind of love that doesn\u2019t require a person to love you back\u2014one where the person might not even know you. And another where you might know someone all your life and then realize, at the end of hers, that you never really did.<\/p>\n

Doing what you love can help with this. Doing what you love allows you to remember so well, to feel so closely how you have loved, that you can forget the space between yourself and the words you draw with. Forget the distance between you and everything, everyone, else. Love becomes transmutable. Freud knew this. Writing can be an effective replacement mechanism\u2014and in its solitude, there is antidote for the deepest loneliness.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s people trying to make sense of a fairly universal experience that most people don\u2019t talk about,\u201d Didion would spit back, as if to say, Yes, well, duh. Didion knows her writing provokes a very personal, often emotional, response from readers. Desperate, even. Is remembering, then\u2014is writing\u2014a way to respond to the promising threat of forgetting? A way to figure out what you might actually think about something, without coming to any confining conclusions? A release\u2014or a holding on?<\/p>\n

By feeling the muggy Georgia poolside air, thick with cicadas and the whirring of the ice cream maker swirling vanilla cream, wafting \u201ctakes-the-rag-off-the-bush\u201d fried chicken, biscuits and greens; her manicured, diamond-ringed fingers, soft Pond\u2019s pink cheeks and blue watery eyes; honey buns and bacon, Mommy-Toot-Toots and German chocolate cake; the deep cool Oriental rugs under wet bare feet\u2014that coming into air-conditioning after a swim in pool water insistently set at a bath tub\u2019s ninety degrees; dark shiny magnolia leaves and scratchy pine needles; that time, running up the steps, you fell, the wind knocked out of you and all of a sudden he was holding you until desperate gasps brought in air again; crayfish in the stream and Disney Channel on the TV; blue and white china, tiny bronzed shoes\u2014the comfort of being a child among a family of adults. An attempt to retrieve something out of the loss.<\/p>\n

To make use of the otherwise potentially mad-making material of which life is made. And Joan Didion, I\u2019d hoped, would help me parse this material, help me make something of it. How presumptuous it all sounds. How naive. Whether or not she\u2019d want to walk with me, though\u2014that would always have been up to her.<\/p>\n

Lucy McKeon<\/a> is a writer based in New York<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each Sunday, we would walk down Lexington together, the conversation taking the tempo of our steps: slow, meditative, purposeful. She\u2019d always be in immediate need of a coffee, so we would head for our caf\u00e9. The one on Seventy-something, a fifteen-minute walk from her place. We would never spend too much time in her apartment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[4723,8830,8768,1362,124,4693,75],"class_list":["post-39461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-blue-nights","tag-heroes","tag-idols","tag-joan-didion","tag-new-york","tag-nostalgia-2","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMeeting Joan Didion by Lucy McKeon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 4, 2012 \u2013 Each Sunday, we would walk down Lexington together, the conversation taking the tempo of our steps: slow, meditative, purposeful. 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