Slouching Towards Los Angeles Quotes

“She does not collapse on the stage. She darts onto it, and says the most stunning thing, and then darts off. It is not the weight of her disclosures that stuns the audience, but the lightness of attention as it hovers between there and not there, between her enticing proximity and her blunt distance. Joan Didion is not a penitent in confession, or a lover ready for embrace. She is not even a burlesque dancer. God no. She is a boxer. She floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“John hung in there longer, but hell hath no fury like a scorned Lennon. Before leaving, he composed his takedown of “Sexy Sadie,” as well as the suicidal lament “Yer Blues,” which he wrote when he realized that what he felt most in India was loneliness.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves…tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake…but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.”1 —Joan Didion, “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“On Keeping a Notebook,” you said, “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they…come hammering on the mind’s door at 4:00 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”1”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Joan begins her piece, “Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”1”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Power relations among new people and existing owners evolve, but always as politics. Activists and unions in Los Angeles once fought off a Walmart successfully. It is not biological evolution if Walmarts grow when planted. It’s the struggle of history. Joan Didion left California, sold to McDonald’s, and chose to re-zone the ranch. Her brother, whom she worked with to do this, was a powerful lobbyist for the National Realty Committee during the time when such lobbyists pushed to deregulate mortgage underwriting. He participated in the lead-up to the crisis in mortgage-backed securities in 2008. Powerful land-owning families play a role in how we build our cities, how we claim and imagine the land. I wanted Didion to cop to her role in the process.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“But these details of image making are less interesting than the declarations of the image itself. Like Didion, the inability to enter Shulman’s photograph is its erotic core. It tells you, as she does, that you can’t come in, and yet legions of us, like birds against glass, still keep trying.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“We are all, one way or another, on a fulcrum between meaning and meaningless, between blunt knowledge and narcotic abandonment. Yet, while energized by that fulcrum, Didion’s work always ends up swinging one way. In an interview with KPFK in Los Angeles in 1972, Didion said her character Maria in Play It as It Lays “is coming to terms with the meaninglessness of experience.” This is Didion’s leitmotif.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Cool has been the subject of academic monographs and museum exhibitions, but it can’t be analyzed, obviously, or even grasped. It’s not a matter of any substance, but an erotic idea. Erotic is what we desire that is out of reach, inducing greater desire. And because we humans are ill-suited to recognize that we are cats drawn endlessly to paw at strings that hang from on high, we tell stories about the erotic to try to domesticate it. The dumbest of those stories are pornography. The most glossy are on the cover of Vanity Fair. They are all gods that fail, of course, and we are caught in the thrum of the unreachable, from which we reach harder still.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Many people will say that Didion embodies LA, that she articulates its essential idea. The more I thought about it, the more I came to see that the two are as common as disparate air molecules in the same room. Joan Didion is LA—not because of anything she said about its geography, or its people, or history. It’s the tone. It’s the weightlessness. It’s the cool.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Of course, all writing depends on specificity. But my class agreed that, with Didion, this specificity felt psychologically critical—like a plant reaching its roots in thin soil in a bitter wind. Something about Didion seemed attenuated, alienated, and, yes, dislocated.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“I thought LA would be a softer way to live but I was surprised at its hard edges. “The sunshine is invasive,” my friend Lynne Tillman says of LA. It took me years to grasp the basic physics, that less moisture in the air means the light is refracted less, and thus felt more keenly or—the word that feels most right is sharply.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“New York had come to feel like one of those pieces made by the artist Do Ho Suh, where thousands of plastic figures are pressing their hands up against a plate of glass.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“I lived most of my young adult life in cities where people and buildings lean against each other like deep drunks in a bar.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“In those debilitated days when I did not write and was not a writer, when I only rearranged rocks, in those days when nothing interfered with my writing but the weakness of my character and the limitations of my talent, in those days when no one cared whether I got up or not—sometimes, yet, I did. Didion has been accused so often of glamorizing depression, but instead what she’s glamorizing is the slim possibility of depression not hollowing one out, of despair and doing. I could still get out of bed today, and still move to Mexico with him as we did, and still hope to write a poem he would love as much as I love his work, or at least I could finish this sentence. I can still try, through the sheer plain sadness, to do the best with my life.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Didion is a perfectionist whose perfectionism takes “the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph,” which even Steinem would have to agree is preferable to housework.12”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Anger, she insists, is invigorating and I imagine she’s right about that, and action even better. Steinem might not have trusted the possible coexistence of doing and despair, but I have to. I suspect this is what makes Didion such a beacon, for so many writers or at least the emotionally unstable.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Didion writes of lost days pushing cut orchids around in a bowl of water, and also later, in The Year of Magical Thinking, about dying and being left behind, “the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”8 Her stand-ins find no reason to go on either, like, “I know something that he never knew. I know what ‘nothing’ means,”9 says Maria, who from her mother “inherited my looks and a tendency to migraine,”10 in Play It As It Lays. I mistook fatalism as the content of her writing when it was always the substrate, all that nothing holding up her words over and over. Her despondency is an outlook. I, too, tried to think of my depression as a critical sensibility, or why I found things interesting but not delightful, but sometimes the reason for malcontent is chemical, and sometimes it attaches to an arbitrary aesthetic fastidiousness, and sometimes it finds a real mark, but when there is a structural, external reason for the estrangement we call it grief or revolution, not depression.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“My affliction was mostly the commonplace that my life was beautiful and small, that I was loved and no bombs fell around me, and in the presence of this luck I “meditated on my desolation,”5 as John Lahr wrote of Didion, not in flattery. There was plenty of pioneering optimism in the desert, and after the market crash there were square acres of land for $10,000, but most days what I felt in the air was a certain dry inertia that comes from surviving too many days of worry that your life might be slipping away, and who knows why we ever do not do what it is we should have done.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“I was living in Joshua Tree, on the edge of a national park, with someone who barely tolerated me but more than anyone else, and I could no longer tell myself I was not a writer because I did not have the time. I was not a writer because I no longer enjoyed my own thoughts. I could not write my way to calm.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Other days I was up at dawn, and the day had promise, and I started another project I would never finish, and other days I had an assignment, and so I finished a project that didn’t matter at all but because I thought of myself as somewhat reliable. Maybe I didn’t know at the time I was depressed, but I am not so sure in retrospect either. I could have just been dehydrated. I know that the day would drag on while I tried to find a reason for it.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“As soon as she started talking, however, the atmosphere changed. She did not mention her flu, and dug right into the details of the story she wanted to tell, about women whose narratives did not fit streamlined, mainstream narratives, about the way politicians and journalists used these women as pawns, about a writer’s obligation to truth even when it must be excavated, and about the spuriousness of objectivity. The neuroses pinned on her minutes before disappeared in her fierce clarity. Didion’s desire to make room for uncertainty in her own story and others, so often mistaken for evidence of her glamorous infirmity, was actually part of a lifelong commitment to carving out clear, accurate space for messier realities—human fragility among them.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“After the fashion brand Celine launched its Didion ad in 2015, featuring the eighty-year-old writer with her signature bob and dark glasses looking frail but, again, composed, her fragility graduated fully into mainstream branding. Elle magazine described her “minimalist” style as “at once fragile and strong,”1 and fashion blogs ran pieces celebrating Didion’s pull and influence over other women, as if it were her distinct, intrinsic ability to be wispy and smart, rather than something more wrought and deliberate, that compelled us all.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“It took me four days to make it to LA on a meandering route through Nashville, Austin, and Phoenix. When I finally pulled into town on the 10, I felt like it was the end of a movie, and I was my own hero walking into the sunset. I was free.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“sensations exist without physical cause. “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past,”7 Didion famously claimed in this essay. However, looking at the now iconic portraits of the young writer, I see a woman who is reluctant to smile for the camera, as if happiness or hope were somehow naive, given all that she knows. By any account she actually was living the dream during this time, but the passionate gratitude her fans have for Joan the person can be explained, I think, by our certainty that she never bought into the myth. She had seen the world and accurately gauged its promise. And then she made her place in the sun anyway—defying her own odds.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“Then there’s the subject of Didion’s first recorded story, which she tells us she wrote at age five in a notebook that her mother gave her in hopes she would stop whining and start to write it all down instead. The story features a woman who “believed herself to be freezing to death in the Arctic night, only to find, when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the Sahara Desert, where she would die of the heat before lunch.”4 What is this woman’s problem? For one, she doesn’t know where she is. Sure, you can read Didion’s sensitivity to being displaced as a sign of her own neurotic or depressive tendencies—and she is the first to admit that a well-adjusted person would never need to keep a notebook in the first place. You can also read her attention to displacement as a form of political alienation, reflecting a generational loss of innocence—often associated with the political upheavals of the 1960s—that gives so much of her writing its moodiness. But when I was a teenager in the 1980s in Libertyville, Illinois, population 17,465 and not one of them interested me, I read it differently: as a command to find the right city for me, to find my people.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“And she said it in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”—which has obvious appeal as a how-to primer for any aspiring writer who likes to eavesdrop but which also delivers an unexpected meditation on identity and place. I was in the right place until it was the wrong place, she says of herself. Or to me: There is nothing wrong with you; you are just in the wrong place. This idea that there is a right place and time for each of us, and you can vacate it by mistake and return to it only at great expense, fills much of her work with a kind of anticipatory nostalgia—looking backward even as she projects into the future. It’s an example of what Shakespeare called the “preposterous,” which as his scholars love to point out literally describes a condition where “before” follows “after” or “pre” follows “post”—a state of chronological, and often psychological, confusion. Remember the scene in “On Keeping a Notebook” when Didion sees a blonde in a Pucci bathing suit at the Beverly Hills Hotel surrounded by fat men? The blonde does the one thing that a blonde in a Pucci bathing suit was born to do: she “arches one foot and dips it into the pool.”2 There, she’s in her element. Right time, right place. It has a cinematic or photographic quality, like Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“For one thing, they share a willingness to consider New York from a cinematic distance, overlooking the city’s many irritants except insofar as they add grit and drama to their personal story. In day-to-day terms, this manifests as complaining vigorously about subway hardships and bedbug plagues, and then posting Instagram photos of the skyline at sunset. A not insignificant number of the New York lovers I know—especially the twenty-somethings—are actually pretty unhappy day-to-day. I picture the prom king’s date sitting near him at a party, ignored but still kind of proud to be in the room and on his arm—and incredibly offended at the suggestion that she should break up with him for someone who dotes on her more. Oh, how California dotes! Sun yourself. Take the car. Let your guard down. Breathe deeply, and you’ll smell the jasmine and dusty sage. Show up twenty minutes late. (Just text “Sorry—traffic.”) Explore the weirder corners of your spirituality. Describe yourself, without sarcasm, as a writer slash creative entrepreneur. Work from home. Spread out. Wear the comfortable pants. When I describe this sunshine-and-avocado-filled existence to some New Yorkers, they acknowledge that they really like California, too, but could never move here because they’d get too “soft.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“For one thing, they share a willingness to consider New York from a cinematic distance, overlooking the city’s many irritants except insofar as they add grit and drama to their personal story. In day-to-day terms, this manifests as complaining vigorously about subway hardships and bedbug plagues, and then posting Instagram photos of the skyline at sunset. A not insignificant number of the New York lovers I know—especially the twenty-somethings—are actually pretty unhappy day-to-day.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light