Joan Didion

Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook"

Joan Didion (1934- ) grew up in Sacramento, California, and earned a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956. She's been an editor and columnist for Vogue, The Saturday Evening Post, Life and other national magazines. With the publication of her first novel, Run River (1963), Didion began a prolific freelance career, evolving a cool, dry style that provided an effective counterpoint to the turbulent era that was to follow. A long essay on sixties counterculture and San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district was central to Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), the collection of essays that announced her as a master of cultural reportage. Although she has written highly acclaimed novels, such as Play It As It Lays (1971) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), the essays and non-fiction collected in The White Album (1979), Salvador (1983), and Political Fictions (2001), have made her reputation mostly that of a prose stylist and keen-eyed social and political observer. In the essay below, which originally appeared in the magazine Holiday in 1966, we are taken behind the scenes and shown some of the more subjective aspects of her work.

CONTENT

1. For Didion, what is the difference between a notebook and a diary? Why does she keep one and not the other?
2. Didion writes that keepers of notebooks are a "different breed altogether." Are you a member of the notekeeping breed? Why or why not?
3. What is the Syndicate? Who is John O'Hara? What does Didion want to pass on to him and why?
4. What is a mnemonic? Where in the text does Didion show her notebook being used as a mnemonic?
5. We are brought up, Didion writes, to believe that others are "by definition" more interesting than ourselves. How do you think Didion feels about such an upbringing? How do you think it makes her feel about keeping a notebook?
6. For Didion there seems to be a moral element in keeping a notebook. What is this element? Is it more or less important than the mnemonic element?
7. How random are the entries in Didion's notebook? Do they have a common thread?

STRATEGY AND STYLE

1. Didion writes that her first notebook was a "Big Five tablet," and she includes several direct quotes from her notebooks. What purpose do the quotes and this detail serve in the essay?
2. "Redhead getting out of car in front of Beverly Wilshire Hotel, chinchilla stole, Vuitton bags with tags reading: MRS. LOU FOX, HOTEL SAHARA, VEGAS." Such detail is central to Didion's notebook entries. Make a list of some of the details she reproduces and the specific memories each elicits for her. Speculate as to how she chose which particular details to record.
3. How did you picture Didion as you read her essay? What specific cues from the essay helped you form the mental image you did? (By the way, many of the links below will take you to pages with photos of this author.)
4. Didion's essays are often said to flow beautifully. How does the frequent use of parentheses help create the seamless rhythm of this essay?
5. How much do you trust the things this author tells us? What evidence from the text can you provide to support your answer?

1. In general, do you like to write or do you avoid writing at all costs? What was your overall reaction to "On Keeping a Notebook"? How can you relate your first answer above to the second?
2. Describe your note-taking techniques in class. Do you listen mostly, and just jot down a point or two? Perhaps you try to write down everything? Have you ever tape recorded a class and tried to transcribe it later? How can you relate these things to Didion's technique?

SUGGESTIONS FOR SUSTAINED WRITING

1. Buy a notebook that you can keep in your pocket or purse or bag. Over the course of a week, write down things that interest you from your daily encounters with people, books, movies, the Internet, and so on. Write them down immediately after you encounter or think of them. At the end of the week, write an essay about your experience of keeping a notebook. Did it turn out more like a diary or more like one of Didion's notebooks?
2. Find a fragment of your writing by looking through a desk drawer, your computer documents folder, or the books on your favorite shelf. Like Didion, assemble some associations and memories elicited by the fragment until you have enough of them to compose several paragraphs. What's changed over the time since you wrote the fragment to your rediscovery of it? What hasn't?

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Grab your text and read (or reread) "On Dumpster Diving" by Lars Eighner. He wrote that essay, and the book from which it is excerpted, based upon notes, a diary, and letters he wrote while he was homeless. Write a comparison/contrast essay using his work and Didion's as your main subjects.

WEB CONNECTION

Here's an essay by a writer who explains why she doesn't like Didion. Read it and take notes until you are familiar with the author's main points. What do you think of this author's argument? What in your reading could help you support or refute this argument?

LINKS

Biographical

This is a profile of Didion from Barnard College for a speech she gave there. You'll also find a photo there. What is the focus of the information on this page?

Here's Didion's entry at Infoplease.com. How does the information presented here differ from that in the link above? Do you consider the information here trustworthy? How can you tell such things about internet resources?

Here's a Didion bibliography and links to an excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem and to an external page. What kinds of things can you learn from just studying a bibliography? What are the limitations of bibliographies?

Bibliographical

Here is an interview with Didion from Salon about her novel The Last Thing He Wanted. She also talks about the impact of technology on her writing. Check it out!

Didion replies here to a letter regarding an essay of hers about public prayer that appeared in the New York Review of Books. On which side of this issue do you find yourself? Which writer makes a better case on this page? Does one answer affect the other?

This page has a link to Didion reading from her essay "In El Salvador: Soluciones." What do you make of her reading? Is it as easy to absorb her ideas in this format as it is to read them?

Cultural

This is a review of Didion's novel The Last Thing He Wanted. Based on the review, do you want to read this book? Can you make any connections to other works that you've read by this author?

Did you know that this author has been a fairly frequent contributor to film? Here is a Didion filmography. Have you seen any of these pictures?

This is a photo of Didion at a women writers photo gallery. Do you know any of the other writers featured there? How would you go about gathering information on them?