Photo: Jorge Flores Joan Didion is coming. Joan Didion is coming. Joan Didion is coming. And then it’s November 8th, 7 p.m., the Brigantine Room at the Harbourfront, don’t be late, don’t stop to say hi to your friends, you can see them anytime, Joan Didion is here. It’s like seeing Bob Dylan. Or Leonard Cohen. Like Patti Smith. I can’t imagine anyone not loving Joan Didion, but I also can’t imagine anyone loving Joan Didion more than I love Joan Didion. Oh. I should warn you now: for me her name is one of those inseparable names. I can’t just say Didion. I’d probably rather take my own life than call her J… her first name. Anyway, it’s willfully delusional of me; it’s what she calls, later, “an incorrect thought.” How could I love Joan Didion more than all these people love her? Have I even read everything she’s written, every cool clear lovely savage thing? I have not. Even close. I came to her late, I think; I was probably trying to write like her before I read a single thing of hers. I haven’t yet read Blue Nights, which is what she’s here to talk about, by the way. There was an interview in the L.A. Times that made its rounds earlier this week. Joan Didion said something about being on book tour and having to go to Toronto “where you don’t ever want to go in your whole life.” Toronto people got Toronto-mad about this. Not people I know; people on Twitter. I disdained them instantly. Why would she want to come here? She’s from California. There was, too, something on Slate about Joan Didion’s apparently weird defensiveness about privilege. (Writers don’t like it when other writers aren’t poor.) Somehow she’s been made to feel strange about a fact and facet of her life and writing that has never any more/less hidden than anything else about her. And somehow the commenters, some of them, fail to understand that she lost her husband and her daughter with no warning, within 18 months, and that instead of going somewhere fancy to die, she wrote a book, The Year of Magical Thinking, that makes people grieve better and understand their grief better and want to go up to her in airports and hug her. They also fail to understand that she’s a genius. I am not a superfan of very much but I’ll defend Joan Didion against anyone. She knows so much about the quiet awful machinations of the world. She is too rare for it. That phrase, “rare bird,” seems invented for her in her aging age. She should be kept safely under glass. But she’s here. Before the host gets up on stage, everyone seems to be talking to cover up nervousness, and then the host herself, Piya Chattopadhyay, does seemingly just the same thing. It’s an impossible job. Joan Didion’s presence is like an unplucked string. Everything else all noise. There’s clapping, I think, and Margaret MacMillan walks on–god and Churchill bless her, but nobody cares right now–and then I’ve looked down for one second and suddenly I look up and realize Joan Fucking Didion is there, is here, and that’s how I am able to maintain the idea that she’s supernatural. She didn’t enter; she appeared. The host has to make a speech about how great Joan Didion is while she’s right there, here, and Margaret MacMillan looks at the host, and the host looks at her notes, and everybody else looks at Joan Didion, and Joan Didion looks at us. She looks down with the proper diffidence when awards are listed, and looks back up when it’s safe. When Chattopadhyay reads out some random tweet about Joan Didion, the punchline of which is literally “she’s awesome,” then (only then) Joan Didion’s head tilts toward the spotlight that shines over this tweet-reader. Her face registers a gentle curiosity about how anyone can be so stupid. The conversation is based entirely on questions MacMillan asks, because if there’s anything Joan Didion wants to tell you of her own accord, she will write it down and sell it. Most of those questions are about grief. Makes sense: grieving is the subject of The Year of Magical Thinking, and grief colours Blue Nights (so I gather), and these are her last two books. I’m not sure it’s Joan Didion talking–she is so very frail, so tentatively present–until she’s explaining the importance but impossibility of eating while grieving and she says “a perfect congee with ginger” and that is so Joan Didion. It’s easier after that, but still difficult; there’s a serious disquiet in the room. Sometimes MacMillan will ask a question (“do you think we’re afraid to say death or dead?”) and Joan Didion will respond laconically (“yes”) and then remember her manners and explain herself, but even then she takes pauses and breaths that feel so so long (yet now when I play the tape back, aren’t), like she might just stop forever. Or she repeats the last few words of the question (“a burden of guilt and blame”) but without the question mark, as if she needs to make sure what she has heard, or has no short-term memory. The few times Joan Didion is asked to talk about how she writes, which I think is what we all want to know about (at least half the Toronto journalists I know and like are here), she drops aphorisms. “Details are our business,” she says, being generous when she could have said “my.” “Writers can make a detail out of anything.” Or: “Nobody sits there thinking about getting older. It’s not useful.” Or: “If you’re a writer, you think you can make the world your way.” Or: “I put quotes around words to distance myself from them.” Or even something like advice: “What I try to do is find a rhythm, and the rhythm sets the book.” About those details, this god of them explains that once she realized that the protagonist’s emerald ring in Run, River should have a long particular back story, the rest of the novel “wrote itself.” Everybody laughs. We’re laughing at the absurdity of it, the “if only it were that easy” of it. We’re laughing in probably equal parts embarrassment and relief over not being great, like Joan Didion. That was almost the best part. But this really is. It’s also, naturally, the saddest and the tellingest. It happens accidentally. MacMillan asks if Joan Didion is losing memories, the vividness of them. “Because I write them down?” “No, because time goes by.” “Because time goes by,” says Joan Didion, eliding her misstep, or playing it as it lays. “Of course.” __ Sarah Nicole Prickett is the Toronto Standard Style Critic.
