Good Reads: Joan Didion

How have I never read anything by Joan Didion until now? Actually, I can tell you exactly how. I remember reading rave reviews when her book The Year of Magical Thinking came out in 2005, and promptly deciding not to read it because it had a stupid title that sounded a whole lot like a self help book. Ditto on my choice to ignore someone recommending her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem--possibly because I have a tendency to avoid anything with religious allusions in the title.

However, I am an idiot. Despite her penchant for lame titles, Didion is exactly my kind of author. Thoughtful, nostalgic, a gift for beautifully detailed sentences that perfectly describe a moment or a feeling... I read her most famous essay, "Goodbye to All That," yesterday, and I think I'm in love.

Fortunately, some good (typo-prone) samaritan has transcribed the essay online--read it, please. I need other people to gush about how gorgeous it is with me. And if you have already read it, recommend which of her books I should read next! I need more.

The beginning of "Goodbye to All That," to tempt you:

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.