Our craving for story is elemental, and therefore inescapable. Readers today might chafe at all these strident assessments declared on their behalf: Who is “we” here, exactly? But humans’ desire to make the world meaningful is a species-level seduction. “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices,” she writes, in part. in the 1960s, goes like this: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” What is sometimes forgotten is the series of lines that comes after it. The first line of “The White Album,” Didion’s partially autobiographical account of L.A. Read: We sell ourselves stories in order to live
She observed the world that was, even as she mourned the world that might have been. And her second-most-common subject was grief. Her most common subject, instead, was entropy. She had no patience for the pablum sold in the hectic American marketplace: bootstraps, merits, salvations. She was a storyteller who rejected mythology. Thinking about her wide body of work-essays, novels, memoirs, pieces of criticism, each with their own tendrils and limbs-I keep coming back to “Insider Baseball,” because it captures something so essential about her approach. But the piece was singular, and scathing: a collective profile of, as she wrote, “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”ĭidion died today at 87, still one of this moment’s most debated and admired and consequential writers. It was titled “Insider Baseball,” and it has since been, like so many of Didion’s essays, so widely imitated that its innovations can be easy to overlook. She documented the moment in an essay for The New York Review of Books. She watched as presidential fitness was redefined as athletic prowess with the consent of the national media-as the myths that shape, and limit, Americans’ sense of political possibility were manufactured in real time. Didion watched as a baseball was procured, a staffer tossed the ball to the candidate, he tossed it back-and as the cameras dutifully captured the exchange. The assembled journalists were trailing the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. In 1988, Joan Didion joined a scrum of reporters on the tarmac of the San Diego airport to witness the writing of the first draft of history.
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