25 December,2023 09:48 PM IST | Mumbai | Nandini Varma
Evelyn McDonnell
At the centre is the location. "She sought her jackpot in journalistic explorations of new places, people, and cultures," writes Evelyn McDonnell (below) about California-born Joan Didion, one of the most iconic writers of the 20th century. McDonnell's new book, The World According to Joan Didion, is timely because it stands as a reminder, lest we forget, what important journalism and writing can do.
When Didion passed away in 2021, many mourned her death. Not just journalists alone; the compass had no end. The sheer variety of newspapers and magazines that paid her an obituary are testament to how wide she spread her wings. Didion reported the political strain in the US and the El Salvador Civil War of 1982; wrote novels that transformed American thinking; teamed with her husband John Gregory Dunne to develop screenplays; composed fashion pieces; critiqued the media's imprudence; and cried her heart out in her memoirs. Didion was "fearless, original, and a marvellous observer", said Robert B. Silvers, the editor of New York Review of Books, an important figure in her life to whom McDonnell dedicates an entire chapter.
McDonnell's book introduces all these aspects of Didion rather well. She examines Didion's role in shaping 20th century writing, and offers delightful analyses of the writer's style without being too didactic about it. The book by no means claims to be a biographical account. The reader is, therefore, forewarned to abstain from searching for Didion in her completeness within it. The title, with the words "the world according toâ¦", might even be misleading. What McDonnell really sets out to do is to take us to places that Didion was always looking to make her own. From her roots in California to her time working in New York, the essays uncover what made Didion a reporter par excellence and a writer who found stories in the details: in the sounds, the sights, and the smells of her surroundings, as she observed it all in silence. She shows us "what it was for her to be her, at different places and different times."
For a reader who has been exposed to her work, this book will not do much. In fact, the first two chapters read somewhat like only introductions. And one does not necessarily have to find anything cardinally wrong with that. Readers entering the world of Didion for the first time, regardless of their agreement or disagreement with McDonnell's analysis, would find themselves itching to pick up a Didion book immediately, sometimes even mid-sentence.
