Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Didion’s burning take on her surroundings made it feel more imperative to be alive to your own.ĭidion is now gone but her language lives on. Didion’s language would somehow match the moment: Her furious prose would light your world more brightly. If I was to work again at all it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.” As we sit here, shattered by a global pandemic, trying to fathom how – if at all – to speak to this chaotic moment, it’s hard not to notice how this sentence by Joan Didion still rings terribly true.įor those of us who counted Joan Didion as a literary hero (and there are many), it didn’t really matter when you opened her books, whether in the middle of a global pandemic or during a corrupt presidential administration or while watching the horrible and banal environmental devastation of late-capitalist America. Here’s just one famous sentence, from the beginning of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: “I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.

Every time I come back to her essays, they thrill and shock anew her sentences dazzle. Like almost every other writer I know, I kept returning to her - as a college student, as a graduate student, as a teacher of writing. She also made you feel that your own worlds – inner and outer – however paradoxical, were urgent, valuable and worth studying. Didion, who died on Thursday at the age of 87, knew how to make you see her world.

Her presence and her sentences were electrifying, and became invitations to writerly watchfulness.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion