Even words begin to feel too blunt-force, so much less than what we might have hoped.
The whole essay is about how stories are failing, how at various moments in most writers’ lives language feels slippery and useless, stories too sensical and coherent to have anything at all to do with the life we’re trying to hold. Whenever I hear that quote, I get prickly, defensive. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Through the death of her husband : Life changes in an instant and then her daughter, 20 months later, at 39. Why is this woman so sad? some critics lamented, but if you spend any time at all in the world Didion was observing, the question also arises, why weren’t they?Īnd that sad woman just kept writing. Of course what that essay shows us is that those questions aren’t answerable not even particularly interesting.
Is that 5-year-old O.K.? Should she have taken her home, or called somebody in? What to make of Didion’s psychological deterioration as described by her psychiatrist’s assessments in “The White Album ”? How sick was she really? How much was it all just the world, seeping in? There’s an idea around writing that we do it to make sense, to give shape, but staying free of the assumption that there’s sense to be made was one of Didion’s most astounding accomplishments.
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