Salvage other books: Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady need no Session with your child.” Other literary analysts devised ways to “Portions of anyįairy tale or children’s story can be salvaged during a critique “As a parent you should become an interpreter of myths,” advised LettyĬottin Pogrebin in the preview issue of Ms. To put it another way, while everyone else drank the Kool-Aid, she stuck to Coca-Cola and cigarettes: But the reading is a dissection: of our fondest aims and beliefs, of all our watchwords. Maybe this is why it remains easier to look at pictures of Didion than to read her.
Rereading her, you find her astringency relentless, undimmed by age. She did that with her own sentences, too. Radically upgrading Hemingway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to determine how much truth was in it and how much delusion. She was exceptionally alert to the words or phrases we use to express our core aims or beliefs. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotion with general reality, imposes-as Didion has it, perfectly, in “ The White Album”-“a narrative line upon disparate images.” But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. The same goes for “magical thinking.” Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. A sentence meant as an indictment has transformed into personal credo. How else to explain the odd ways we invert her meanings? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Perhaps when your subject is human delusion you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it. It is a peculiarity of Joan Didion’s work that her most ironic formulations are now read as sincere, and her sincerest provocations taken with a large pinch of salt.
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