Why She Writes
Last night I watched the documentary “The Center Does Not Hold,” about the writer Joan Didion. It chronicled Didion’s chronicles of crazy episodes in our nation’s history: Haight-Ashbury, Charles Manson’s murder of Sharon Tate and others, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. But mostly the film is about Joan Didion’s thinking on these things.
A Wikipedia article about Didion mentions a 1980 essay by Barbara Grizutti Harrison, who wrote that Didion is a “neurasthenic Cher” whose subject is always herself. Apparently, that article rankled Didion for decades. Of course, the essayist’s subject is always herself.
Almost none of us writing essays will achieve Didion’s fame, but we can all do what she did, which she explained in her essay “Why I Write”: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
(In Didion’s honor, a western landscape.)
