They Had It Coming
This is a piece I wrote over a decade ago. I had never gotten such a positive reception to an essay before. The people who reached out to me were almost uniformly women, and all of them loved Joan Didion’s writing as much as I do. Almost all of them said some version of the same thing: the piece described exactly how they felt about Didion but had never been able to put into words. I knew exactly how they felt. The whole exercise had been one of trying to put my own feelings into words. Seamus Heaney said, “if you have the words there’s always a chance that you’ll find a way.” I had the words and then found the way to the point of the operation, which is the essay’s conclusion.
The essay describes the night she came to my parents’ house for dinner when I was 14; I can’t say something as corny as from that night forward I knew…. But I can say unequivocally that the essays in her first two collections, Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Albu m have had a huge effect on how I write, how I think through an essay, and my range of subjects. There will never be another Joan Didion, but every American women essayist has had to grapple with her work and her response to it. That night in Berkeley, she hadn’t yet written the White Album. She was at the beginning of something, and I was at the beginning of something else: becoming a woman.
I was keenly aware that every detail about that dinner party that I put on the page would quickly pass into the official record, which is what happened. And I have a confession to make: after the piece was published I received a letter from a literary person that consisted of one sentence: “Joan Didion has never owned a Chanel suit.” I was mortified: I’d made a mistake about something she wore when she was one of the best writers in the country on the subject of clothes and what they reveal about people.
The whole thing was conducted in the gentlest way possible; the letter hadn’t been sent to the magazine’s editor, but to me. Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, was in charge of correcting the record, sometimes viciously so. But there was nothing vicious about this at all; it was merely the correction of a detail. I later learned that the essay was very much approved by the couple, and this letter – while producing nausea for the 48 hours after I received it – was a sign of something better than approval. It meant that she took me seriously,
What would I do with this fact? I could send it to my editor and ask for a correction, but I was too craven and too embarrassed to do that. Even just 14 years ago I was still too green to understand that no matter what you do the point of writing isn’t to build your own reputation, it’s to tell the reader what happened. Which is what I’m doing now. So here’s the lesson, one I’ve seen proven over and over again: the truth bats last.
