Reading Joan Didion this summer should mean The Year of Magical Thinking. But I’m not up to dealing with her dealing with her husband’s death and the illness that would eventually kill her daughter, so I’m reading instead the Everyman’s Library compilation of her seven books of nonfiction written between 1968 and 2003: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. The title is from the opening of The White Album, published in 1979:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
During the fall semester I’ll assign Didion’s “On Keeping a Journal,” found in most anthologies, because my students will need to keep journals that I’ll read and grade. I’ll encourage them to look carefully and record without worrying about reasons or consequences. Some will, but most won’t because it’s an alien concept, the metonymic truth that lies in detailed, seemingly syncretic observations. . . and inimitable prose.
