It's 'the texture of the thing'

 

“What'sso hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything elseis going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down thefirst two sentences, your options are all gone.” –Joan Didion

 

Bornin California on this date in 1934, Didion said writing was not on her radarscreen in her early years.  “I didn’t want to be a writer,” shesaid.  “I wanted to be an actress.  I didn’t realize thenthat it’s the same impulse.  It’s make-believe.  It’sperformance.“

As a senior at UC-Berkeley she entered an essay-writing contest for Vogue magazine(on a dare) and won the national top award – a job after graduation at themagazine.  In just two years at Vogue,she worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor,and wrote her first novel, Run, River, published in 1963.

 

Shemarried writer John Gregory Dunne.  She and Dunne co-wrote a numberof screenplays, including an adaptation of her novel Play It As It Lays andthe biography of journalist Jessica Savitch Up Close & Personal.   Didion’s novel A Book of CommonPrayer was widely lauded, but her most celebrated work was herheart-wrenching The Year of Magical Thinking, which won theNational Book Award and chronicled the year of her husband’s death anddaughter’s battle with cancer.

 

Didion,who died in 2021, said she enjoyed writing nonfiction and fiction both.  “Writing nonfiction,” she said, “is more likesculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.  Novels are like paintings, specificallywatercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you canrewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”