Joan Didion: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

by Melville House (Editor)

The iconic writer whose prose was as influential and as it is unmistakably hers is joined in conversation with Sheila Heti, Hilton Als, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru and many more.

Some writers define a generation. Some a genre. Joan Didion did both, and much more. Didion rose to prominence with her nonfiction collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and she quickly became the writer who captured the zeitgeist of the washed-out, acid hangover of the 60s. But as a bicoastal writer of fiction and nonfiction whose writing ranged from personal essays and raw, intimate memoirs to reportage on international affairs and social justice, Didion is much harder to pin down than her reputation might suggest.

This collection encompasses it all, in conversations that delve into her underappreciated mid-career works, her influences, the loss of her husband and daughter, and her most infamous essays. Far from the evasive, terse minimalist that has come to dominate the image of Joan Didion, what this collection reveals is a warm, thoughtful woman whose well earned legacy promises to live on for readers and writers for many generations to come.

Series Overview: The Last Interview and Other Conversations celebrates the heroes of arts and literature with a collection of interviews from the artists' working lives.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Memoir, Anthologies, American

192 pages, Paperback

Published June 28, 2022

Reviews

[leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

i always love getting a deeper insight into joan didion and her writing process. she was such a talent <3

[Morgan]

in her last interview with Lucy Feldman:

Feldman: Do you have hope?
Didion: Hope for what? Not particularly, no.

god i love her

[Alexa]

It’s hard to rate this because it’s a compilation of stuff I have already read but it’s a fun concept and of course I crown myself one of the biggest Didion fans ever 👍

[talia ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

a genius completely of her own kind

[Cath · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m sorry but when Joan Didion said "I haven't got a center. I don't know where my center is. I don't know where I'm going to find it. Once in a while I'll wake up in the middle of the night and think well - I'll have some flash of something that looks like a center, but it doesn't signal - it's a mirage”…no one speak to me for two days

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely perceptive about her own work, strengths and weaknesses. Excellent insights.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Davidson: Do you think of yourself as sad or depressed?

Didion: No, I think of myself as really happy. Cheerful. I'm always amazed at what simple things can make me happy. I'm really happy every night when I walk past the window and the evening star comes out. A star of course is not aa simple thing, but it makes me happy. I look at it for a long time. I'm always happy, really.

...

Davidson: There's a certain aesthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.

Didion: Well, every day is all there is.

[Court Schueller · Rating 4 out of 5]

My lovely best friend Hannah gave me this book for Christmas because she knows I worship Ms. Didion like my own personal deity. I love her even more after reading these interviews! Only thing that could’ve made it better is if it was longer/more of Joan talking!! Some of the interviews felt like they wanted her to answer a certain way, but I loved when she strayed away from that. I miss her the way I miss someone I’ve known my entire life.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The books in this series tend to run the gamut from slipshod (Graham Greene) to superb (Jorge Luis Borges). Fortunately, Joan Didion: The Last Interview and Other Conversations is one of the better titles. It helps when the interviewers seem to actually have read some of the works they are discussing. And it helps that the interviewee, Joan Didion, knew how to express herself well.

[Kathleen Suess · Rating 4 out of 5]

anything Joan Didion, I will read.

This book gathers interviews with her, chronologically.
I admit to not always fully understanding her way of looking at things and life, but I always admire and respect her thinking.
Interesting and poignant chats with Didion, letting the reader into her unique thoughts.

[Sarah Blankenship · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very nice collection of essays. you can get see some of Didion's "happy" traits showing through in her responses. The Last Interview is actually such a disappointment. it's very obvious that the interviewer didn't reallyyy know who Didion was and hadn't studied her writing. it's also the most inorganic interview out of all of them. since it was in 2020, i wouldn't be surprised to hear if it was just a sheet with some questions on it, but i wish the interview either did a phone call/zoom interview or asked Didion to provide some more follow up information.

[Yaphet May]

RIP I hope she’s still stringing words together in the afterlife ✊

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some productive thoughts on life and writing.

[Kaitlin MacDougall]

Feel weird about star-rating on conversations and anyone’s personal thoughts. I enjoyed reading it.

[Mads · Rating 4 out of 5]

learning that joan didion also thought she was less interesting in verbal conversation than in writing has done wonders for me

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

These interviews are less than charming, contemplative, or revealing. It’s evident that Joan Didion didn’t see the value of giving interviews Fair enough. She understood it's part of what she had to do and so she did it. I don’t resent her for being a reluctant interviewee. But those doing the interviews in this collection aren’t helping, either. Particularly, the last interviewer’s questions are pretty vapid (“How does it feel to be a fashion icon?” “What would you watch [on T.V.]?” It’s silly that I’m still reading the lesser works of Didion without yet having read the classics. For some reason I thought it would be interesting to read her in this sort of reverse order. Rather than interesting, it may just be that I’m delaying gratification, saving the best for last. Or perhaps I’ll decide, after reading Slouching and The White Album, that Didion just isn’t for me. A stylistic and political mismatch, albeit a writer of sturdy sentences.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“DAVIDSON: Do you admire elegance?
DIDION: Yes, because it makes you feel better. It's a form. I'm very attached to certain forms, little compulsive rituals. I like to cook; I like to sew. They're peaceful things, and they're an expression of caring”

“You get the sense that it's possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK; it's worth doing. That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something”

“I did not like having to put dog in Joan Didion's name. And I did not want to speak to Joan Bibion”

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didion: .... Once in a while if I'm forced into it I will conduct an interview, bit it's usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who's allowed to hang around for a while. It doesn't matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don't trust it.


So you've been warned. You might even feel sorry for Lucy Feldman of Time, who conducts the actual "last interview," if her questions weren't so callow and there are no words to excuse Terry Gross' insufferable presumptuousness, but Sara Davidson and Hilton Als elicit thoughtful responses.

[lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

didion’s moulin rouge.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Well, I'm so tired of that stuff — I'm really tired of this angst business. It seems to me I'm as lively and cheerful as the next person. I laugh, I smile... but I write down what I see. There have been reviews of Salvador that have said I found it so depressing because I find everything so depressing. I would like to know how they would find it? After all, what do they think is down there?” The version of Joan Didion that emerges in The Last Interview, a small collection of interviews from her career including the final one given before her death in 2021, is in many ways recognisable: sharp, wry, and unafraid to call out any ridiculousness she sees. But there is a warmth to her, an openness and pervasive good humour, that I think is often ignored or unseen in assessments of Didion’s personality. Sure there are some awkward or less polite interviews in this set, though not all of these are Didion’s fault: she tries her best in a truly awful, gawking interview by Terry Gross, not long after the death of her daughter Quintana, about the book she had written following the death of her husband John some twenty-months prior. And in the titular last interview, she is short, snappy, and hilarious with an “idgaf” attitude. Elsewhere, I really enjoyed the interviews with Hari Kunzru and Sheila Heti, two of the more insightful inquisitors. Her explanations of her own craft are endlessly rich, and so are her views on life, love and loneliness, describing her family as “for me a kind of salvation. […] From a loneliness, an aloneness. […] Just having another person, answering to another person, was very — it was novel to me, and it turned out to be kind of great.” And of course we get some of Didion’s most iconic quips here, including one of my personal favourites: “DAVIDSON: There's a certain aesthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day. DIDION: Well, every day is all there is.”

[josephine]

So interesting.

I got this at the same time that I got The Year of Magical Thinking, with the intention of hopefully garnering a pretty solid first impression of Didion as an author and as a person. Obviously, Joan Didion has written a lot of books and essays and articles, but choosing one of her most famous and vulnerable works of non-fiction, a memoir, and also a collection of interviews spanning several decades... I think these were good choices for a first impression.

And what an impression she has made.

In both The Year of Magical Thinking and in the interviews in this collection, Joan Didion comes across as an incredibly down-to-earth person with some interesting and thought-provoking ideas. These interviews, the first of which is from 1972 and the last from January 2021, dove into so many topics and so many themes and could be very varied in general, and it made it so interesting to see her answers. It was also really interesting so see a certain consistency in some things that came up in multiple of the interviews.

Also, hearing her thoughts post-The Year of Magical Thinking immediately after having finished the book myself was a very satisfying "completion" of my read of that book.

All in all a very interesting compilation of interviews with a very interesting woman and writer, and I'm very glad I got it and also read it when I did.


Now I'm going to watch Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold to wrap up this Didion session. I'm so looking forward to my next one!

[sofia ines]

---“When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. It gets me past that blank terror’ (89)
--Talks about how writing The Year of Magical Thinking was like a report or a dispatch from a state that not everybody had yet entered.
--Talked about Emily Posts advice to help people grieving by making them warm, literally.
--“A lot of what I had seen as New York’s sentimentality is derived from the stories the city tells itself to rationalize its class contradictions.” (112)
--“Novels are also about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with” (116)
--Advice on writing with a partner “We’d work on different parts of the screenplay together. If he started it, I’d usually follow and rewrite. If I started it he would rewrite. Really only one person can make up the plot. You can’t just sit there and talk about a plot. One person can sit there and come up with characters. Then the other person can polish that and work out the details. It was whoever was free to start it. The other person would come up behind.”
--“I haven’t got a center. I don’t know where my center is. I don’t know where I’m going to find it. Once in a while I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and think well–I’ll have some flash of something that looks like a center, but it doesn't signal–it’s a mirage” (136)

[Wendy Johansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've heard more about Joan Didion than I've read her works. This makes me want to read her works, as she writes about the period in our history that is my own. I would start with her final works regarding grief, as that's what I'm going through now. I am intrigued by the fact that she wrote both nonfiction and fiction as compellingly. I intend to check out both. ("The Last Interview" series would also be worth checking into with other notables featured. The interviewers are as interesting as the interviewee.)

[Anne Connolly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found her discussions about grief to be deeply moving. However, as you would expect, she holds more inside her about her daughter and without meaning to be ghoulish I don't see the point in writing or talking publicly about her daughter when she clearly does not want to share these feelings.
Maybe it's the publisher who wants her to have spoken about her death.
There were some sections that were bordering on incomprehensible. My guess is that these simply needed better editing. Other than that, this was a reasonably good read for Didion fans.

[Shannon Caroline]

I can’t get over Joan Didion calling herself inarticulate in conversation versus writing…

Also, the tiredness in her responses by the “Last Interview” made me sad for her. The questions were a bit flat, at one point, the interviewer asked “do you have hope” to which Joan responded “for what? Not particularly, no” lol iconic. I guess she never really had much interest in interviews and just saw them as part of the job description. But despite that, the earlier interviews were very insightful and interesting to read!

[Ami Boughter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joan Didion, you were the greatest.

"I haven't got a center. I don't know where my center is. I don't know where I'm going to find it. Once in a while I'll wake up in the middle of the night and think well - I'll have some flash of something that looks like a center, but it doesn't signal - it's a mirage."

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because I'm a massive Joan Didion fan, anything with her name on jumps out at me. I should have just read this set of interviews in the bookshop, it's not a long read. I learned much more about Joan from the Netflix documentary that came out a couple of years ago. This book didn't add much at all. I see it's part of a series of books called 'The Last Interview.' Hmm.

[Adeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty superb collection of conversations with Didion, covering various decades, topics and books. Unfortunately the last two interviews aren’t good and close the book on a mediocre note. In one case, Sheila Heti corners Didion into yes/no answers; in the other, Lucy Feldman seeks generic one-liners. But if you ignore those last two chapters, it’s a funny, thoughtful and insightful book.

[Sophie Wood · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars! i love joan so much — i didn’t realize this collection of interviews would not be giving context in between. sometimes it made for a fun game, but most times i just wished the context was there

[M. Sarki · Rating 4 out of 5]

…I don’t think anything is improper in fiction, that there’s any area that can’t be dealt with…

Please read the rest of my review here:
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/jo...