pour one out for joan didion this holiday season
and i don't mean a beer i mean a coke — this woman drank a can of coke to start her day every single day and she lived until she was 87 ... something to think about
This week, the queen of my literary heart, Joan Didion, left our world. Although most of her work was based in the 60s and 70s and 80s, it belonged to every generation. She wrote about topics that I — prior to reading about them in Joan’s words — once thought were boring. I did not think I was ever going to find an essay on California governor mansions interesting, but Joan Diddy proved me wrong. She connected that a governor’s choice of residence can tell a lot about his (specifically Reagan’s) personality, politics, and public perception of both of those attributes. Boring, right? Not when Joan Diddy writes about it!
She wrote about the Manson family and Linda Kasabian and gives us a story about buying Linda a dress for her first day of court that deserves its own Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood. She was one of the first to publicly write that the Central Park Five, long before their exoneration, that the crime was about white against black narratives that clouded the better judgment of reporters, police, and jurors. She wrote a beautiful and extremely detailed essay on having a migraine, which isn’t something I enjoy reading often since I don’t want to read poetic sentences about some of the greatest experiences of my life! I love migraines. Huge fan. But she still made an essay on migraines sound so beautiful while also sounding so awful. She could write about anything and make you interested in it.
Not only could she write about different topics all over the board, but she wrote about grief better than anyone. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan wrote, “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” In her other books, she constantly had her game face on, which was stern and hardened. But in this one, she let her guard down and allowed us to connect to her through our own struggles with grieving. If you’re ever having trouble figuring out how to process your grief, I highly recommend The Year of Magical Thinking.
I wasn’t going to make the entire newsletter about Joan Didion this Sunday; it was gonna be about something more related to the holiday, like the fact that THIS character in the movie Elf said he was 26-years-old.
An important topic for next Christmas, perhaps. Or maybe I was gonna do a three-paragraph rant about people who put antlers on their cars. You’re not fooling anyone; we all know that it’s a car. But I’ll leave that till next year. This Christmas, I want to talk about Joan Didion!!! Her voice was so important to me and is still so important to me. If you haven’t read any of her work, yet, I recommend at least reading a few of her essays and then reading her books if you like them. And if you need more convincing, she and her husband did write A Star Is Born (the Barbara Streisand one). So yeah, read her work she was an incredible writer and was also a fashion icon. She is my fashion icon. Go look at a photo of her from when she was, like, 31 or from when she was, like, 80. You’ll be like, oh yeah ok Kerry has definitely worn that outfit in the past. She’s wearing a very cool sweater vest in one of the photos, which means I am right and you are wrong sweater vests are cool end of discussion Joan Diddy is always right.
Another important point! Not that nerds aren’t cool (not trying to get canceled by nerds this holiday season), but Joan Diddy was soooo cool. Here is a photo of her just smoking and wearing a fricken cool long dress leaning on her yellow Stingray:
To end this week’s shorter newsletter, I want to also throw in how indifferent Joan Didion was about nonsense questions. Andy Warhol used to interview some of his friends and other super cool, big-time artists for Interview Magazine, and he would ask nonsense questions like, Do you dream? and What did you have for breakfast? Here are some hilarious responses:
Yet again, this point has been proven: Joan Didion was and will forever be an icon. Love you, girl.
