I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem when I was sixteen, then moved on to "Play It...

I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem when I was sixteen, then moved on to "Play It As It Lays." She taught me about how beautiful you can make a sentence and still get away with it. She never went an inch into excess. When I was 18, I did a term paper about her for English class. I wrote her, care of her publisher, Simon and Schuster. Six months later, my mother got the mail from the box and i remember her yelling out to me in my room: "Who in the world is writing you from the Pacific Coast Highway?" The letter came on Tiffany stationary and was written in fountain pen. She made a pen slash through her monogrammed name and, for twenty years, I tried to figure out the meaning of that gesture. I had asked her about her style and, in response, she said, "Style is everything you are, aren't, hope to be. Style is character. Old bromide, but I think true." That letter still hangs on my wall, framed, in Manhattan. In college, I read in an interview that she smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. I tried to smoke them, too, but the paper stuck to my lips and the tobacco slipped out and when I looked in the mirror, my teeth appeared to be sprouting hairs.

Later I went to work at Simon and Schuster and met her a couple of times. She did not exude warmth and was so tiny that when glimpsed on the street with her husband, looked like his daughter. At a graduation party for her daughter, Quintana, Didion served fresh guacamole and chicken flautas from Zarella. I spilled a frozen margarita and broke the glass. I was mortified. Didion, summing up the situation, snapped her fingers at the maid and the woman flew into action. I had never seen anyone snap their fingers at a human before. Sometime later, Joan got into a huge row with Michael Korda at Simon--over his description of her book, Miami, in a tip sheet-- and demanded to be released from her contract. When her agent couldn't get her out of her contract, she fired her agent (the late Lois Wallace) and hooked up with Lynn Nesbit. Here was a woman generous enough to answer a fan letter from a small town teenager, but who snapped at maids and was tough enough to fire an agent who had helped make her a star in favor of someone more commensurate with her sense of her own power and importance. For a long time, I weighed all this in my head when I tried to sum up Didion.

Around the office, there was a certain amount of gossip about Didion's war with Korda. I remember standing at an elevator, filling one of the older editors in on the latest round of the battle. I remember the look of horror on the face of that editor, who was a loyal friend of Korda's and who always made me laugh. "Didion," she sighed, "Didion. I hate little people. Never trust little people. As far as authors go, stick with zaftig. They are always so grateful for a lunch." I wanted to run to Joan Didion and tell her that line and, all through my life, I have seen and heard things and sentences and thought, "Joan would appreciate that." She trained my eye and ear, as she did for so many. I think you can hear her now in these sentences I am writing. I can. Happy birthday.


Timeline Photos
@[140487126025467:274:Joan Didion] turns 80 years old today. Also on this day in 1976, Didion famously called writing "a hostile act" in "Why I Write", an essay published in The New York Times Book Review. In an interview with @[18709970741:274:The Paris Review], Didion said: "It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture ... Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream."

Read the full interview here:
http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...