However, the book doesn’t read like someone in denial. The more of Blue Nights I read the more her confession made sense. When asked point blank by the interviewer, and, later, by well-meaning audience members how she was coping, how she had managed to keep it together-“unravel” was the word used more than once by her interrogators-she confessed, “I’m a good denier…so are most of my friends.”
Her interviewer scoffed at the idea that the prose was anything less than purest spun gold, but Didion wouldn’t take the compliment and bluntly reassured her, as she did several times over the course of the hour-long interview, that look, any good writer knows these things about her own work.īack home, reading the freshly inscribed copy of Blue Nights, I am reminded of advice I read once in a driving manual, something about how to avoid serious injury if you should find your vehicle headed straight for a telephone pole or tree: angle the vehicle left-of-center so that the car is dealt a glancing blow.Īgain and again, Didion seems set on a crash-course for a head-on collision with despair over the fact that her daughter, her only child, is dead. Perched precariously in a tall director’s chair at the front of theatre below the big white screen, Didion characterized the writing in Blue Nights as the rawest and most unpolished of her career. I hadn’t read the book yet, but I brought a copy with me that I was hoping to have her inscribe to my wife, Jess, who turned me on to Didion ten years ago. The event took place in the Avalon Theatre, a charming old movie theatre with a tall glowing marquis. to hear Joan Didion talk about her new book, Blue Nights.
Last Thursday evening I accompanied a group of ten students to Washington D.C.
0 kommentar(er)
