Hilton Als and Emma Cline on the Late Joan Didion

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2022

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

Joan Didion tried and failed, she said, “to think”; that is, to write about abstractions and symbols, and make grand arguments in the manner of the New York intellectuals of her time. Instead, the California native—who died in December, at the age of eighty-seven—built her work around close observation of American life as she saw it, withholding judgment. And while many of her intellectual contemporaries belong now to a bygone era, “for my generation,” Emma Cline notes, “her influence is so massive.” Cline’s best-selling novel “The Girls” is set in nineteen-sixties California, on the fringes of a cult—what we might think of as Didion country. “I almost can’t think of a writer who is more of a touchstone for every writer that I know.” In fact, younger writers need to “unlearn” her voice, Hilton Als tells David Remnick, in order to find their own. Als notes that Didion eventually rejected the persona of her early works, which was imbued with white female fragility; and she was prophetic, he notes, in placing race and gender at the center of America’s battles. Since Joan Didion’s death, The New Yorker has published Postscripts by Als, Cline, Zadie Smith, and Nathan Heller. Some of Didion’s own contributions to The New Yorker can be found here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.8	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.5	I'm not very analytical. I just tend to think if something's out there, then I've got to show it to somebody else.
0:24.3	That's the late Joan Didion, speaking on WNYC in 1987.
0:29.2	I'm very, very bothered all the time by people not seeing what's out there, not wanting to see things that are perfectly obvious.
0:39.8	Joan Didion had a long and evolving career, from her early novels through the extraordinary essays
0:45.1	about American life in the 60s and the 70s, the political reporting of the 80s and 90s,
0:50.4	and then the memoirs of personal loss in the 2000s.
0:54.6	Didian died when she was 87, just before the holidays.
0:58.4	And in the weeks since, there's been an outpouring of a claim that shows something quite clearly.
1:04.6	Joan Didion's reputation continued to grow over the decades,
1:08.2	where some of her contemporaries seem now like voices of another time,
1:13.0	Didion still speaks to several generations of writers and readers.
1:17.0	I like words. I mean, I like making, I'm very excited by seeing what can be done with words.
1:24.5	So why is Joan Didion's work aged so well? In The New Yorker, we published a number of postscripts on Didion, and I'm going to talk with two of our contributors. The critic Hilton Al's will join us in a second, but first, here's Emma Klein. Emma, how you doing? Good. How are you?
1:42.0	Klein has written fiction and essays for The New Yorker and her novel, The Girls, from 2016,
1:47.7	is about a young girl drawn into a cult in 1960s, California, what we might think of as Joan Didion
1:54.2	country.
1:56.0	You've chosen a passage from Joan Didion to read.
1:59.1	Can you set this passage up for us?
2:01.8	Yeah, so this is from her essay called Why I Write that she delivered when she was a lecturer at Berkeley when she was 40, and she had attended Berkeley as an undergraduate.
2:15.7	During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried with a kind of hopeless late adolescent energy to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.
	...

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