Didion why i write new york times

A physical fact. I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas--I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well as the next person, "imagery" being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention--but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton.

For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus.

During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: I I I In many ways writing is the act of saying I , of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.

Which was a writer. By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I did this. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of Paradise Lost, to certify me proficient in Milton. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus.

During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of ?

Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind? She stresses the power of sentences as the living fabric of literature:.

What has made her so lasting and important to so many? Why are we still talking about her and reading her and teaching her writing in classrooms? The book unpacks this legacy subtly, in a way as twofold as its title: Because she means things, and because she means something.

In each essay, Didion is explaining what she means when she says things, often things that shock or intrigue. And then she goes on to tell us what she means by that. For Didion, sloppy writing is sloppy thinking, on the border of being immoral. When she made the pivot to writing about politics in the s, she frequently focused not only on what people, especially politicians and pundits, were saying to the public, but on the way they said it, and the meaning they tried to repress in their rhetoric.

And she holds herself to the same standard. So the process of writing is the process of thinking. Taken together, they reveal how she is trying to interpret — by writing about others, mostly — what she herself actually means to us.

She has branded herself not as Superwoman but as Everywoman, a distinction that seems to remain unclear to her critics.

She is writing, at least a little, about herself. That seems faintly self-aware. She is, on the one hand, the writer who seems fragile and reserved, even the woman trembling in the Berkeley bathroom — the Everywoman.

In her later years, she is the woman left alone by the untimely deaths of her husband and daughter, losses she tries to process in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights with extraordinary vulnerability. Words are her scalpels. Not everyone learns to write like that. Why does Joan Didion matter? Because she has chronicled, for well over half a century, how the powerful use words to obscure meaning.

How lies get dressed up as truth. How we all submit to magical thinking when confronted with the inexplicable or the frightening. How we make up stories to convince ourselves that we have everything under control, how we spin webs of meaning from words and sentences and turns of phrase. How we write to find out what we mean. How we need, wisely or not, figures who can make meaning for us out of chaos. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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