Hilton Als and Emma Cline on the Late Joan Didion

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K 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, the co-production of WNWC Studios and the New Yorker.
0:11.3	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:14.6	I'm not very analytical.
0:18.8	I just did anything of something out there, then I got to show it to somebody else.
0:24.5	That's the late Joan Didian, speaking on WNWC in 1987.
0:29.2	I'm very, very bothered all the time by people not seeing what's out there, not wanting
0:36.8	to see things that are perfectly obvious.
0:39.9	Joan Didian had a long and evolving career.
0:42.8	From her early novels through the extraordinary essays about American life in the 60s and
0:46.8	the 70s, the political reporting of the 80s and 90s, and then the memoirs of personal
0:52.0	loss in the 2000s.
0:54.6	Didian died when she was 87, just before the holidays.
0:58.6	And in the week since, there's been an outpouring of a claim that shows something quite clearly.
1:04.7	Joan Didian's reputation continued to grow over the decades, where some of her contemporaries
1:09.5	seem now like voices of another time.
1:13.0	Didian still speaks to several generations of writers and readers.
1:17.1	I like words and I like making, I'm very excited by seeing what can be done with words.
1:25.0	So why is Joan Didian's work age so well?
1:28.2	In the New Yorker we published a number of post scripts on Didian and I'm going to talk
1:32.1	with two of our contributors.
1:34.0	The critic Hilton-Halls will join us in a second, but first, here's Emma Klein.
1:38.8	Emma, how you doing?
	...

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