Joan Didion – the author of three memoirs, two political travelogues, five novels, and now, with Let Me Tell You What I Mean, seven collections of essays – was born in northern California, in 1934. Her upbringing was somewhat fraught. Her father drank and suffered breakdowns, her mother intoned the dirge-like motto, “what difference does it make?”, and Sacramento County unfolded its annual cycle of fire, flooding, wind and drought. Meanwhile, beady, small-boned Joan passed the time reflecting on the fact – or so it seemed to her – that nothing matters, and scratching away in the notebook she had been handed, at the age of five, to stop her “whining”.
As a means of psychic survival – to keep the world from “eating her up”, in the words of the critic Alfred Kazin – she generated an array of defences and dependencies which are now part of Didion lore: the nicotine and nosebleeds, the sunglasses and sweet tooth. There was also, Christopher Isherwood reported in his diary, a voice that she wielded as an “instrument of aggression”, and “the most thrilling medicine cabinet” – beside her own mother’s – that the film producer Julia Phillips had ever seen. A paradox defined her marriage to the writer John Gregory Dunne. He was always by her side, and always “a hothead”. What would set him off, she was asked? “Everything.” Just as the “order” symbolised by Los Angeles swimming pools affirmed her fear of water as “uncontrollable”, so Dunne insulated Didion from that sense of pervasive precariousness of which he was also a courier. She needed reassurance that things would be OK – and also that she was justified in feeling under siege.
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