Joan Didion, who inspired a generation of young writers including this one, died Thursday. She was a lot of things, but one of them: she was a brilliant contrarian. My favorite of her pieces skewered the trendy movements around her. When hippies were cool, where was Joan Didion? She was writing the darkest portraits of the movement that were ever made. She was showing readers the preschool-aged child whose parents gave her LSD. She went to the beating heart of the utopian progressive movement of the era–in the heart of the city where I was born and raised–and she showed what the unmooring looks like up close.

In “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” Didion gives us a hilarious take-down of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, where well-meaning young hippies wander glassy-eyed across her pages. . . . The Didion I read would quietly find the flabbiest bits of American culture. She was ruthless and funny. She was not on your side. She wasn’t on anyone’s side. If Didion had been working these past few years, I have no doubt who she’d be writing about.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/tgif-i-couldnt-handle-vacation-edition

You didn’t bother to read what I said.

Mac:

To be sure. Though I would go further.

My impression is these women who criticize Didion are spiritual Daughters of the Strong Matriarch, the woman who formed them as writers. Now they are dissatisfied with Didion and wish to break free, but how can they exorcize such a monumental influence?

Not happy, at the passing of Joan Didion. You both have good points to make IMO.

Merry Christmas.

Didion came from a conservative California family, she voted for Goldwater and she even voted against Nixon in a primary because Nixon “was too liberal for her.” Her stint with NR was hardly out of character.

Her problem with the women’s movement went well beyond complaints about evasions of personal responsibility. Straight up in the first five paragraphs of her essay, “The Women’s Movement,” she analyzed the movement in terms of the latest attempt at Marxist revolution in America.
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In fact there was an idea [behind the women’s movement], and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women’s movement would have seemed to have any interest at all.

–Joan Didion, “The Women’s Movement” (1972)
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/30/archives/the-womens-movement-women.html
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Rather prescient for 1972, I’d say. At the time I don’t remember any mainstream commentary on feminism going directly to the M-word (Marxism) like that. We are seeing the same dynamic playing out today.

It’s true Didion drifted away from orthodox conservativism. WF Buckley called her an “apostate.” She claimed this was due more to her dissatisfaction with the Republican Party than the attractions of the left. See the following article for more:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/08/joan-didion-unorthodox-conservativism/

It’s interesting that she submitted work to NR, which was at the time a subcultural magazine with a much smaller circulation than the ones for which she usually wrote. Didion’s been compared to Garry Wills, which is inapposite inasmuch as the only thing they had in common was some association with Wm. F. Buckley ca. 1962. Didion was not aligned with any faction, political or cultural. She did not write polemics. She did not write polemics polluted with forensic and rhetorical tricks. (See the late Paul Mankowski SJ on the scams incorporated into Wills’ modus operandi). Wills on his best day might write something that would be of middling quality in DIdion’s corpus.

Not at all. Antedated Sokal by about 25 years. The burden of the essay was that the feminist magazine journalism of the time amounted to a complaint against the demands of personal responsibility and adult life.

My mother (an older contemporary of Didion’s) tended at the time to be critical of feminist agitation, in large measure because their modus operandi was at war with the way a prudent individual – male or female – navigates adult life. She’d say “they’re vocal“, and in her life of 40+, the vocal people you know are generally the ones making your world worse. She also thought attempting to invade male spaces (e.g. private clubs) was a waste of effort and to no one’s benefit (“now that you’ve forced your way in, what are you going to do?”). She was discontented with many things, but also at a time in her life when you’re resigned to that. Feminist jabberwocky offered absolutely nothing which would address two-thirds of her discontents and offered nothing other than ‘sue the ba*tard’ for the other third.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3160976/chinese-city-xian-punishes-officials-allowing-virus-spread