Author Evelyn McDonnell On Joan Didion’s Life and Legacy (Pt 2)

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2:37Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:29Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Soap Podcast. I don't know if you can hear that squeaking, squeaking there. That is Joan Didion's chair. I'm sitting in Joan Didion's chair and today's episode was recorded at Joan Didion's table. If you listen to the podcast regularly, you know. We've got some special, a little special piece of history that the Daily Stoic studio is built around, fellow sacramentan, a writing hero of mine, and I think a great lowercase stoic and just an absolutely fascinating woman, Joan Didion. Love her books. I've read almost all of them. We carry a bunch of them on the painted porch.

4:07And so I was really excited when today's guest book came out, The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell. And it's a great biography. I think the first great biography of a figure who I'm sure people will be writing and talking about for many, many years, and someone that I wanted to have on the podcast. And I think she did a great job. Evelyn is a professor of journalism, an essayist, a critic, a native Californian who has been teaching Didion's work for many, many years and has a unique perspective on her. And you can check out her awesome new book, The World According to Joan Didion.

4:40We've got signed copies of The Painted Boards. You can follow her on Twitter at Evelyn McDonald and on Instagram at Miss Lady Evelyn.

4:56I do love that she still went out into Central Park every day, you know, in her wheelchair with, you know, the dog that Griffin gave her.

5:14that she, you know, did not just lay down and die. Yes. Right? Yeah, there's a kind of a grim determination to her. Yeah. And to enjoy the outdoors and go, you know, see, you know, the bench for Quintana and go sit on the bench. But your point about how ultimately those two terrible losses do fuel her greatest work. I mean, and no one would trade those things. Like even as a fan, you wouldn't trade those things. And certainly she, as important as writing and being seen as a great writer to her, was. No one would say, I'm so glad it happened because X. Right, right. But that is the job of the writer.

6:03That is the, even more than stringing words together, the real ability is to take the experiences of life and see the seed of an artistic idea or truth in them. And your magical thinking was so profoundly successful, you know, bestseller, you know, became a Broadway play. And wins the National Book Award, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Not because like it was, you know, this tell all by Joan Didion, but because it was essentially a guide to how to deal with death. And that's what, you know, people still to this day, right. You know, share it. It's like the number one book you give someone when they've lost someone because, you know, she was so open and transparent about her self delusions and also trying to understand what the process of grieving was.

7:01And she's at once, you know, pitiless in exposing herself, but also very human. Yeah, the specificity, it's the most vulnerable and personal and raw that she is in any of her writing somehow is also the most general. And those are probably related to each other. Like she's so mined herself and what she went through that it is the most uniquely human of all of the things that she's done. Right. And let's face it, like, you know, half of us are going to lose a spouse, right? And particularly, you know, women tend to outlive their husbands. And so she was speaking to, you know, something that's the widow, right?

7:52And for and - Death and Taxes. And she, she wrote a book that owns one of those two categories. Right, right, right. And, you know, on the tour for it, this people would just, there's all these stories of the people who would come up to her and thank her and, and crying and, you know, which I think was really hard for her to deal with in some ways. It's a heavy weight. Yeah. Yeah. But she, she went out there and, and, and held people's hands and, you know, let them. Yeah. And I mean, like, as I wrote this book called The Obstacle is the Way. And I think on a superficial level, The Obstacle is the Way is, hey, you can take these little things that happen to you and you can find, oh, actually, there's this opportunity here.

8:34You can turn this around. You know, your flight's delayed. You can use that as an opportunity to go for a walk or whatever, right? Like there's little ways that you take the things that you thought were bad or that you didn't want to happen and turn them into good things, right? But it's at that deeper level where You experienced like profound tragedy and loss that you would never choose to have gone through. And it's not fair that you went through, but it's this opportunity to find something within yourself that maybe you didn't know was there. And maybe if there's no redemption in what you do for you, the value, the opportunity is in what you help other people with, right?

9:15So it's like what she wrote and went through writing, you know, losing her husband and daughter and writing these two books, it doesn't help her that much, right? I mean, there is something inherently therapeutic about writing and processing. Right, right. But the majority of the benefit, the value is reaped by us, the reader, by the rest of the world. Do you know what I mean? She took her pain and suffering and made it useful and educational and made other people feel less alone with it. And that's the beauty of that. That's how she transformed that sort of unmitigated tragedy into something that had some value in it.

10:08Right, right. Right. And just that concept of magical thinking that, you know, she's basically saying it's okay to kind of lose your mind. Yes. Because that's part of... That's an act of grace she's providing other people. Yeah, yeah. I, you know, somewhat ironically, I lost my dad in April as, you know, the book was in process. and it was just so helpful to have, you know, immersed myself in Joan and understanding that a concept of magical thing is like, okay, I'm just going to be insane for a while. And that's just, you know, what it is. And I'm not going to beat myself up over it. And I'm just going to, you know, go through this.

10:52And that's what happens. Well, because she so unsparingly depicts what a person going through unexpected loss and grief looks like. Right. It then becomes a way for you to experience that a second time. So I guess what I'm saying is like we only have the benefit of our own experience typically. Right. And then if someone can detail their experience, then we go, oh, this is normal. Right. Or this is what it feels like. Or this is how other people dealt with it. So what she's taking, and this is what art fundamentally is, I think, or the best art, is it's allowing people access into another world or another life.

11:39And they can take or not take what they want from that. Right. Right. And so to take something as personal and specific as losing a husband and a daughter and depicting it in such a way that now anyone losing anyone can go, oh, I'm not losing my mind. Right. This is how it looks and works. These aren't new feelings that no one has ever gone through. Right, right. Is a profound gift. And that's what she transforms that experience into. It doesn't make it go away. Right. You know, you don't go, well, I do miss my husband, but now I have a national book award. This is all cold comfort. Right. But the service that she provides is primarily to the benefit of humanity and other people.

12:30Right, right. So let me ask you a philosophical question. Earlier, you brought up what John says to her when they come home from the hospital. You don't have a choice. Right. Yeah. And she says to him, you don't have a choice. and then he dies, right? Was that his choice? Yeah, I did think about that. Like, is it, I mean, is that him going, I'm opting out of it right now? I don't think, you can't choose to have a heart attack. But there is something, those are the two, I guess the deeper reading is those are the two choices. Right. Right, like you either die or you go through it. Right, right.

13:07But like, when we say to ourselves, like, I just can't go on, I can't do this, one more thing goes wrong like those are the two choices either like because we're not in control so the only choice we have is to either carry on or not right I mean maybe he was maybe he was explained to her why he was dying he's like I can't do it right I don't have it in me my time's up yeah yeah the stoics talk I mean, this is obviously not super politically correct today because we have a better understanding of mental health. But they saw suicide as, they said, the open window. And their point was more like when you live in a time of tyranny and disease and where horrible things can happen.

14:00Like they were saying like, if they can make you do it, then you don't know how to die. And they were talking about, you know, if you live under a tyrannical emperor who wants you to sacrifice your values or, you know, do horrible things, like you always have this choice, right? And I don't think we need to take it that far, but it is the idea that like, look, there are two choices. You either deal with what's in front of you or you don't. Those are the two choices. But the real magical thinking is pretending it doesn't exist, lamenting how unfair it is, wishing it was otherwise. Like that's – I think that to me is where we get into a lot of trouble.

14:45It's not like people choose to die instead of dealing with their problems. It's more like we pick this fake third option. Right, right. Which is like just putting off facing the fundamentally binary reality of life, which is you either keep going or you don't. Right, right. Like Marcus Aurelius had this crippling stomach ailment that we don't know what it was exactly, but we get the sense he's sort of like what we would call today his chronic pain. And he's even given like opium to deal with it. So it must've been extremely painful. And there's one passage in meditations. He says something that I think about a lot whenever I don't feel good.

15:26He goes like, he goes either the pain will kill you or it'll stop. Do you know what I mean? His point is like, life will either take care of this problem for you or you got to figure out a way to keep going. Right. You know, and I, again, there's something fundamentally binary and I think a little sad about that. Right. But welcome to being a fucking person. Right. You know, like there's something kind of fundamentally sad and binary about the fact that we just, we're not in control. Right. And our problems will either, our problems either have a solution inside them or they don't. Right. Right.

16:09What do you think when she, what do you think she meant when she said that? That you don't have a choice. Yeah. Um, well, I think, you know, yeah, she was, she was, that was the very practical, you know, rational Joan Didion, right? Um, which is just, you know, get over it. What are you going to do instead? Right. Uh, just, we're not going to deal with it. Like that's, um, not the answer. And, you know, I, I obviously she, I think, you know, I think maybe he was like, maybe, I think he, maybe he knew it was, it was killing him. And she was trying to tell her. So do you think, and I do think there is this problem in some of the stoic approaches or just people who are very logical and intellectual about things, is that there's kind of a lack of empathy.

17:00Like, that's a sad thing to have been the last words that you say to your husband. True or not. Right. Right. Like, that's a sad thing to have said. Right. Basically buck up and deal with it. Right. Even if that's what you need them to understand at the end of the conversation. Right, right. It should have been, I don't know if I can deal with this either. Or, you know, I understand, you know, on top of your own issue, your health issues. Yeah, no, you're right. You can say, I agree, it is a lot. Right, right. But we're here in it together. Do you know what I mean? Right, right, right. Or you could say, we don't have it.

17:40To me, the less than empathetic, you know, bordering on cruel part of it is she said, you don't have a choice. Right. You know, there's an inherent, maybe we're parsing words too much, but she is saying like, you are alone. Like this, you have to put up with it, not we don't have a choice. Right. Although I'm sure she knew that she was going to be – like she wasn't saying I can't deal with this. Yes. So she's like I have to deal with it. You have to deal with it is how I read that. But I'm just saying a kinder way to say it is we have to deal with it. And we are like, if you're the stronger person in the situation and another person is having emotional issues or doubts or fears, like you can give them some of your strength.

18:36Right. Not saying you're being weak. You have to deal with this. Right. And I think sometimes those of us who are kind of naturally that way or were raised in a certain tradition like that, we forget that other people are maybe not there yet. Or they need to be reassured and built up as opposed to simply told to deal with it. And I think a lot of the book is actually her having that regret of not realizing just how bad he had been feeling physically and then emotionally on top of that with Quintana. I think that that is part of her guilt and anxiety is that she didn't realize. She wasn't prepared.

19:24And when he was saying, I can't deal with it, she thought he was just, you know, trying to bail instead of saying, I literally cannot deal with this. I mean, I took a lot of that from Blue Nights. Like, you get the sense that she is, Joan Didion is reckoning for the first time having lost her daughter with what it must have actually been like to be her daughter. Like, to actually be that person. Like she obviously intellectually understood that it's hard to be adopted, but it seems like she maybe didn't. She was regretting having not been empathetic enough to her daughter who had to live with that every day.

20:09And you kind of get this sense that she's reckoning with this sense of, oh, what must it have been like to be my kid? and it wasn't all mansions in Malibu and literary parties. And then it was hard to be this person. And that's a haunting question to have to ask yourself as a parent. You know, you're dealing with the, you get your child's suicide note or you attend a therapy session with your kid or they finally open up and share something with you and you realize, like, I think about this, it's like, let's say you find out your kid's dyslexic. Well, you didn't know they were dyslexic all the times you were chiding them for not taking reading seriously or not paying attention, right?

20:56Right. Everyone always has issues in themselves and we're not always as patient or understanding as people, but especially as parents with what that other person is going through. And you get the sense that she was really wrestling with that after having lost her daughter. Yeah. Yeah. I think so too. But I also feel the poignancy of that, again, did John wrestle with these feelings? Sure. I think that John was also, I think they were both tried to be good parents, but I think they were very caught up in their careers and their, their lives. And, um, I mean, you know, would we have, would we even be here talking about Joan Gideon?

21:45If she had said, you know what, I can't write an, you know, that book or that article because, you know, my daughter's going, which she did. She actually did. If you look at, at her output, she really did not write as much during the years that they were raising Quintana. Um, she really, there is a kind of pause in the novels for sure, in the long form pieces. And then it's when Quintana's in college and afterwards that her career really picks up again.

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25:18Yeah, when we look at Joan Didion's life, we don't have to make exemptions or rationalizations the way we have to do for Hemingway, right? She's not an art monster in the way that most male artists were historically art monsters. Right, right. And so, like, yes, I think she did her best in a way that you can't even begin to say that lots of artists did do their best. Right. But most of us are probably going to reflect back on who we were when our kids were younger and go, I didn't always prioritize the right things. I was more selfish than I needed to be. I was harder on them than I needed to be.

26:01I prioritized things that don't matter to me as much in retrospect. and what's so unflinchingly honest and then also selfless about that book is that she did that and you as the reader could read it and feel and hopefully just do, if it makes you 1 % better, that's a profound gift that she gave you and your family. Right, right. I liked, you noted this one thing in your book, you were saying like Joan Didion is in a lot of press photos and author photos. She's like with her kid. Yeah. And you've never seen a male artist do that. And I think about that. Like people come to the bookstore and they'll like, is Ryan here?

26:49And I'll say hi. And they'll ask me a couple of questions. If I'm not here, but my wife is here, they'll ask my wife where our kids are. Right. You know, nobody ever asked me where my kids are. They assume somebody else has taken care of them for me. And that it's appropriate and natural that I am where I am without them. Right. But there is this inherent judgment in women that if they are not with them, they are playing hooky or something. Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely. And, you know, Joan did keep Quintana with her and took her on the road with her, took her in, you know, hotel rooms, which maybe wasn't the best place for this poor child, you know, to be, but, you know, she did keep her very close to her side.

27:37And, you know, part of the, talked earlier about the flap over the photograph on, on democracy. You know, that photo was taken by Quintana and yeah. And, you know, Joan was very insistent that that be the photograph that was used. like I, she was trying to support her daughter's art. Right. You know, the other, the flip side of that is that I also saw these letters from the agent to Quintana as Quintana starting college at Bennington. Like, can you please send me those photos? I need more of them. I need more of them. And I just have this picture of this poor girl, like just starting college and having to deal with, you know, this thing for her mom, you know, which I'm sure on the one hand, she's like, happy to have her photos published, but then maybe she just wants to go and have like that crazy freshman year, right?

28:30It's certainly a first world problem, but I struggle with it. I go back and forth between like, okay, if you're successful, you have an interesting life, you have a cool job, you get afforded these opportunities to go places and do things. And there's one version where, you know, you neglect your family to reap the rewards of that. And then there's this, on the other end of that spectrum, there's the version where because you like your family and you want to be around them, you want to bring them and you go, isn't this cool? We get to go do this. In Joan Didion's case, we're going to go spend two months in Hawaii while, you know, your dad and I finish this script.

29:09Right. You know, like for me, it's like, oh, I'm doing this talk in Jackson Hole. You guys should come. And I bring them these places and they experience these things. but is actually the nicer, more responsible thing in the long run to let them stay at home and have a normal life. Right. And you get the sense that part of what Didion is reckoning with is like, was I fooling myself that this was cool and enjoyable for her when actually it was stressful on my kid and destabilizing on my kid? and actually she didn't care that she had access to the pool at the Royal Hawaiian. We had a pool at home that we could have been swimming in that we were never, you know, we were never able to do.

29:59Or she didn't want to be with us at all. She wanted to be hanging out with her friends, right? And I think that is a modern parenting problem and it's a high-class parenting problem. Right, right. But it doesn't mean it's not a problem. Right, right, right. Right. I mean, of course, like all working parents deal with these issues and, you know, yeah, it's definitely a luxury problem to, you know, say you could take your child with you to work in a glamorous setting. You know, poor Joan Didion. It's more like poor Quintana. Right, right. Yeah.

30:37Yeah. But I also think that Quintana loved a lot of it. And I think she did really feel close to her mother. What made me think of it is I read this interview with Susan Sarandon's daughter, whose name I'm forgetting, but she's now an actress. And she was asked what it was like growing up on movie sets because her mom would take her with her and her moms also, again, this is like the first generation of moms who could do this, right? So we should stipulate that. But she was saying, you know, obviously I was glad to be with my mom, but like it was also traumatic because I would spend months on a movie set, meet all these people, develop these friendships.

31:23That would be my life. Right. And then it was like we were circus carnies and then we left and I never saw those people again. Right. And so she gives this interview and she's sort of describing her feelings about it. And Susan Sarandon is then asked about that. And Susan Sarandon's like, basically totally disregards it. She's like, hey, I was doing the best I could. Right. It was actually amazing. Right. And think of all the people that she got to meet. And now, look, this is her job. Right. She was like, I was very convinced that it was the best thing for her. And what an incredible opportunity she should be grateful for it.

31:58Right. Right. And I think there is that tendency, like you do your best as a parent, you make the decision you think is right, but it doesn't change the fact that your kids have their own feelings about it. Right. And they might not like it, right? Like it might have been awesome and they could still hate it or it could still have affected them negatively. And I really was touched in Blue Nights with the sense that Joan Didion really was wrestling with, hey, was this the idyllic, amazing, privileged childhood that I thought it was for my daughter? Or was she really struggling in ways that I was blind to and should have been more compassionate and understanding to?

32:39And how did they contribute to the problems that she had later in life? I don't think that Joan ever thought it was wonderful and idyllic. I think that there was enough clear issues along the way that she talks about in Blue Nights that she knew that it was – and all of the novels are problematic relationships between mothers and daughters in some cases in which the daughters are like hospitalized or killed or – I mean – Yeah, sure. You could write a whole book just analyzing those, right? the fictional representations of, of, of her real, her real life.

33:21Yeah. And you don't, you know, she doesn't get to do it over. Right. No, and none of us do. So I think there is something, I think it's why it's important to read books like these and to ask these questions. Cause you get, you're getting extra at bats. Right. By looking at the experiences of other people and the mistakes they made, and the things they did right and the lessons they learned or the things that they came to understand too late. Right, right. And that's kind of the haunting thing about both those books is she's coming to these realizations. Right. Months too late. Right. She misses it by months.

34:00Right, right, right. And then it can help if people, you know, like you, you know, dads like do say, hey, here's, you know, my kids. Ask me about my kids or, you know. Make sure that people don't just, when you talk to people, ask the dads about the kids too, right? Yeah. No, there is something weird where men just don't, like I've talked about this, but it's like men have this secret life where they also have children and it's separate from the work and they don't talk about it and they don't go, I got to leave the office because they're going to pick them up. There is... I think that does a grave disservice because it makes it abnormal.

34:47Right? It's like why if you hear like Pete Buttigieg takes paternity leave and everyone makes him sound like he's a crazy lazy person. Right. You know? Right. And we would not be having that conversation about a female cabinet secretary taking maternity leave. Right. Right. Right. And so the normalization of a very normal part of life is actually really important. Right, right. Absolutely. What did you think she could, another parenting thing, she has that kind of haunting line where she says, and only in retrospect, did I realize I was raising her as a doll. Yeah. Oh my gosh. What did she mean by that?

35:30Um, that I think that she was not, uh, she was raising her as she would want her daughter to behave, not as her daughter was actually behaving or, or B or who were, who she wanted her daughter to be, not as her daughter actually was. I actually think that less damaging for Quintana was the travel and the hotel rooms. I feel like the thing that really upset her was the move to Brentwood and leaving Malibu. And that that seems to have been, you know, she called it the suburban house and going to, you know, Harvard Westlake or Westlake as it was then the girls prep school and having that kind of intense academic environment.

36:26Um, it seems like that was the disruptive, and I'm basing that really on how Joan wrote about these things. I mean, also what people told me about, you know, um, but Joan quoted her as saying, you know, I, that was, that was the suburbia home. She didn't want to be in suburbia. You know, she... There was someone that she fit, and there was a life she was happy with, and they blew it apart for reasons that were less than clear. Right, right. And I mean, largely so that Quintana could go to this school, apparently, is, you know, what one of Joan's cousins told me was that that was a big part of the move that they didn't want her going to school in Malibu, but, you know, school was probably not as important to, and this is like a great, you know, one of these great ironies of Joan Didion is that she wrote a couple times about like, why do parents put this obligation, you know, to do well in school and to go to the right colleges and live their lives through their, their kids.

37:28And then she apparently did exactly that with, with her daughter. Right. Which, you know, I could be talking about myself as well. Right. Yeah. We can, we think that, you know, we can, and we, you know, we do this as writers, we can be great. We tell ourselves these stories, right. Yeah. In order to live. Yeah. And then, and then we make our decisions though, based on like keeping up with the Joneses or whatever feels safest or, you know, the least, nobody thinks they're going to regret moving to put their kids in better schools, but you don't know. Right. You don't know. Right. Yeah. I moved from one side of Sacramento to the other.

38:13My parents like got us into a much area, much better schools, you know, much fancier neighborhood that we're like, we went from top end of a middle-class neighborhood to the low end of the upper middle-class neighborhood, which to them, you know, they're like, they're sacrificing for, to give us opportunities. And all, all it meant to me was like, I have to start over as a person, as a introverted, creative boy in a, in a environment in which I'm not well-suited or of this class or scene. Do you know what I mean? And so, yeah, that ability to go, not what does this look like on paper, but what does this actually mean for my kid, the person?

39:01Not like, hey, this school is statistically better than that school. Right. Or their career prospects are better or whatever, but like, how will it actually affect them is probably the harder thing to think about. Right, right. And it's also quite possible and even probable that really they, Joan and John, were just tired of being way up there in Troncas. It was, you know, really far from the center of activity. It's, you know, beautiful as it was. It was far from Hollywood. And who knows, there might've been other problems that they were getting away from. There were snakes. There were snakes.

39:40I want to talk about snakes too. No, but I thought it was interesting that, you know, talking about, hey, in retrospect, I realized I was raising my kid as a doll. I think about that like when I see and then when you have the impulse, it's like, hey, let's all pose for this photo or let's all wear the matching outfits. Yeah. Or let's all become like when you're – and I think it's particularly common when you have like celebrities or now in this world of social media to make your kid an accessory to the story you are telling the world, right? We tell ourselves stories to live. That's what social media is fundamentally about, your story of you as a parent, as a brand, as a person, whatever.

40:20Right. And your kids can so easily become props in that. And it is not a victimless crime. Right, right, right. It's gross and it also is – it fucks them up. Right, right. Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You don't, you know, and I wrote, I wrote a book about, you know, being a mom. I wrote a, you know, I wrote a book called Mama Rama, which was a lot of it was about this, like how to, you know, balance all those different. I don't even like to balance how to like throw yourself into the convulsions of parenting, you know, working, playing, and having an identity that isn't just about parenting, but then that is part of it too, right?

41:09I mean, it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to do and to do right. Yeah. And, you know, yeah, as my son, who's now 20, he knows that he was in that book. He's in the book as a toddler or my stepdaughters also. Yeah, it's, you know, it's a, I feel, you know, and my stepdaughters were able to read it beforehand, but my son was too young. We were just at the beach and we were trying to take some photos as the sunset, as the sun was going down. And our kids were being crazy. Like our two boys were just being insane, like throwing sand and flipping upside down and making weird faces. And, you know, you get this, you find the words coming out of your mouth.

42:06You're ruining the picture. Right. Right. Right. And it's like, that's not possible. What is this picture for? Right. This is the picture. Right. The picture is to capture what's happening. Like what's happening is that you're being crazy because you're seven years old and that's who you are. Right. And it's wonderful. And we love that. But just the act of the picture or the act of writing about it or the act of, you know, whatever the medium that the thing is being captured in, just it existing creates this sort of artifice or this appearance that we're trying to keep up. And I think, you know, for her, it was probably her reputation.

42:45For Didion, it's the reputation, it's the scene, it's her sense of who she is as a mother. Right. And that your kid is a prop in that as opposed to just a human being. Right, right. And yeah, and, you know, from the beginning, Quintana was in the photos. And, you know, they after, you know, they've officially adopted her, they take her to out to show her off at a fancy restaurant. Like that's their idea of how to celebrate. Look at us. We're the perfect family. Right. We're cool. We're the cool parents. Right. You know. Right. And also, I think for a woman to say, see, I am also a good mom. I'm, you know, adequate as a woman that just because I am a successful writer doesn't mean I can't also, you know, be a nurturer and fulfill my duties.

43:42And, you know, and even though she was having trouble, you know, naturally being a mother, I'm sure. I am a mom. I can't have kids. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with me or us. Right. And it's interesting that, you know, there are so many photographs, you know, of Joan with Quintana or of both of the parents with Quintana, not so many of John and Quintana that we talked about before. And that then Quintana becomes a photographer. Yeah. Right. So used to being around cameras and then to also wanting to take control of the lens. And that then there ends up being this flap over the flap, the book flap of the photograph that Quintana takes for mom that's too revealing for the New York Times.

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47:08And if this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org. Code the Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. She writes this essay about how her dad responded to her not getting into Stanford. Right. But she didn't care. Yeah. Do you think that was, do you think he did that right?

47:44I was thinking about that, right? Like, it's funny how, you know, flash forward all these years later, we're still struggling with that exact thing, even more so. Like Stanford was probably 500 times easier to get into when she's applying than it is now. Right, right. Well, ironically, she got into Berkeley, which is, I think, even harder to get into Stanford now. But yeah. Well, there was that golden age where the University of California really was for the people of California. Right. And it was affordable and accessible. And essentially, if you graduated from high school, you could go there.

48:14Right. You know, right now, like all things in college, it's much, much harder and more complicated. But walk me through how she gets this crushing blow, which is Joan Didion's dream was to go to Stanford. She gets the rejection letter. So even though this is 50 plus years ago, the same fundamental parenting issue is there and how her dad responds. Right, right. So yeah, she went to public. It's interesting because she did go to public schools for all her privilege. She was a product of the public schools of Sacramento, which her grandparents were members of the school board. So they did have this belief in public education, but nonetheless, she went to go to Stanford, for the private college.

49:00And she was so confident in her ability to get in that it's the only place that she applied for. And then she gets the rejection letter, which she then pins to her wall and has pinned to her wall, keeps with her forever. I think as a lesson to herself not to take anything for granted. Sure. And she ends up actually going to community college in Sacramento, Sacramento City College, where now there's, you know, a scholarship in her name. They've just renamed the library after Joan Didion because she did have that brief time of going there. And the family, you know, her family did donate money from the estate sale to Sacramento City College.

49:49But her dad just shrugs it off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, she's not from a family where that's that important. And, you know, this is also when, you know, her father was also an alcoholic and a very dark presence in the house. Yeah, doesn't he give her a beer? Yes, yes, he does. That's his reaction. And she ends up applying to Berkeley and getting into Berkeley and going there. But yeah, she doesn't, it wasn't that her parents had that on her that she had to go to Stanford. That was her own. There's like two ways to think about it. One is he's indifferent and doesn't care. That's probably not great. I kind of took from it.

50:36It's like maybe he had more confidence in his daughter than her daughter and his daughter did, which is like she thought her life was over and he understood that this meant literally nothing. Right. In no way was who she was going to become or how successful she was going to be or what her life was going to look like, in no way was it dependent on this private school up the road giving her a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Yeah. It may be. I think there's some of that. I just think that it didn't matter that much to him. It's interesting she doesn't talk about her mother's reaction. It's true. Because that, I think, maybe it would have mattered.

51:17Yeah, maybe it takes away the conceit of the essay. But yeah, I sort of took the idea from the essay, which is she's going, even then, parents cared way too much about this. Right. And that it's way lower stakes than you think. And they're way, like, you could argue that the personality traits they did instill in her, the resilience and the determination, the sense of self, the self-respect, character, et cetera, these ultimately are way more predictive of who she's going to be and way more necessary for what life has in store for her. Like, you know, when you lose your husband and your daughter back to back, you're not like, what did I learn at Stanford that will help me with this?

51:57Right. You know, you're drawing on something much deeper and it's a different kind of tradition that you're drawing from. Right, right. I think her mom was probably more projecting that her wishes for Joan to succeed than the dad was. And I think that's part of like probably the dad's depression. But like, you know, it was the mom who had like said, you know, apply for the Prix de Paris, you know, when she was a young Girl of Vogue prize, which is what ultimately takes Joan to New York to, you know, really begin her career. um yeah i feel like the mom you know the mom's when they gave her the notebook like yeah uh yeah it's interesting that um for all joan going away and being very clear that you know she wanted to get out of out of dodge out of sacramento right um that she always went back there to write as long as her parents were still living there that she would go to her old bedroom and right.

53:01Yeah. Until, until they moved. And then she went to Hawaii. Right. Yeah. The, the Hawaii connection to Sacramento is maybe an underexplored one because it's so close. I think people don't realize how close it is. Right. Everyone else, it's this sort of exotic thing. I mean, it's closer than New York City. Right. Right. You know, like it's, and it's, it's a part of, if you're in California, and Hawaii is much more a part of America, you know, the American conception than it is if you live basically anywhere else in the U.S. Right. The way New Yorkers go to Florida, you know, yes, Californians go to Hawaii.

53:40That's really true. And she wrote about, you know, sitting on the Pacific Ocean, you know, in Berkeley probably looking off across the ocean and imagining Hawaii there. And that, you know, one of the things that the book is about, it's called The World According to Joan Didion, because I felt that she wrote so much with a sense of place. She wrote a lot about place and that she had these very deep connections to the places that she wrote about. So that was a lot of what I did was travel to these places and try to see them the way that Joan Didion saw them. And even places she wasn't there very long, like her road trip to the South is some of the best American writing I think ever done on the South.

54:33And she was like, I mean, the whole thing's like three weeks or something. Yeah, yeah. And which she went there with a kind of romantic notion that was utterly destroyed by her time there. It's funny, just we read Travels with Charlie by Steinbeck, right? And also his writing about the South at a very similar time in the 60s. I think hers is like 70. She was there. An interesting time to be traveling in the South, not a time to make one feel good about Dixie, right? No. Do you see, having come from Sacramento, do you see similarities between the Delta region of Sacramento and the Mississippi Delta?

55:21It is weird. Like you don't, you don't think of, well, first off, when people think of California, they think Los Angeles and San Francisco. And they don't realize that the whole middle is much closer to the Midwest and the South. And yeah, even Sacramento, it feels like this. Currently Sacramento is a very landlocked city, right? It doesn't feel like a river city, which it was for hundreds of years, you know? And my parents had a small boat that was in the Delta. So we would go down there all the time. But even then, it never connected to my sense of the place. And I've talked about this, like what I've, only after you leave the place can you understand it.

56:08But like, I never, I didn't know Joan Didion was from Sacramento. It never came up. It wasn't talked about. Right. There was no sense that any artists were really from Sacramento at all. Even California, because California is so eclipsed by Hollywood and not even historical Hollywood, but like modern Hollywood, you see it as a place where blockbuster movies are made, not necessarily as an artistic place. Right. And a place with a history of literature. Like you don't think of Fitzgerald writing in LA or Faulkner writing in LA or these great novelists. And so my understanding of California has changed and shifted as I've fallen in love with these writers who were reflecting on that place and telling me about stuff about it that no one talked to me about when I was a kid.

57:04But like Sacramento exists in this sort of weird historical limbo where like you can go to old Sac and the old town is preserved as it was. And then everything else is new and fake. Right. And that. But the old town is fake too. Of course it is. Because it really. It's all wood building. So they've all burned down and been replaced like a thousand times. Right. But she, you know, mocks in where I was from. Right. She's what that's when she like that's her ultimate. That's her moment of epiphany. Yeah. It's like, you know, the things are fairy tales. This is make-believe. It always was make-believe, right?

57:39But even Joan's childhood growing up in the sort of, there are a bunch of historic houses in Sacramento, but like most cities, everyone fled the urban core and moved to the suburbs. This is what white flight was all over the United States. So even if you grow up in a city like Sacramento, for the most part, you grow up in the suburbs of that town. So like you live in a place that everything is 20 years old at most. Right. And so you have this kind of ahistorical place where you're not, you just don't have a sense of what was happening or why or the history of it. And then so what you feel when you move to the South is I wrote my first book when I was in New Orleans.

58:22even though there is the odiousness of the Confederacy and chattel slavery over all of it, everything is old and historic in a way that is so different than where I was from. Right, right. And there's just, I think I took to that as a writer because it was so the opposite of what I grew up with. But there is, I mean, you know, she did grow up in that huge Victorian house that was Jenna B's. No, no, those houses were there. But like 90%, 95 % of people in Sacramento are growing up in a suburban house. Right. Like those, and that area was really not nice. Like even, like now those houses are worth a lot and there's stuff downtown.

59:13Right. But Sacramento was like a town where like government is happening, but that's on very specific. Like you do not go like you don't go to downtown. You would go to downtown Sacramento to see Sutter's Fort and, you know, to visit the capital. The camellias at the capital. Like for one field trip, you know, in elementary school. And that's the extent of your like I remember downtown Sacramento being the place we drove past on the way to Arco Arena where the Kings played. And now that is downtown. They've moved that downtown. But like that's just – like for my generation, that's – there wasn't – everyone wanted to live in new fake McMansion land.

59:55Right, right, which, you know, the Didion family – Was responsible for it. Yeah, a lot of that, right? You know, she doesn't completely ever 100 percent – she criticizes that, but she doesn't say – it's actually my family that's been doing a lot of that. Because again, I don't think she wanted to portray her brother who was part of the, he was the one in charge of the property. Yeah. She also probably liked. She also got a lot of money for it. Yeah. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. The Epton Sinclair thing about how it's hard to understand something that your salary depends on you not understanding.

1:00:30Right. And so she could see it in other people and in other ways. Right. And she could see it much more, I think, in Southern California than she could in Northern California. Right. Right. She criticizes the Hollisters. Yeah. But I think she does that as a replacement for criticizing the Didians. That makes sense. I do. Yeah. I think like everything she says about the Hollisters, and, you know, Michelle Chahura has wrote a great essay, like criticizing Joan for not owning up to it. But I'm like, she wasn't going to criticize her family in that public of a way. And that was her like backdoor to doing it.

1:01:09Well, that ties into something I wanted to close with. She has this great line that you... Oh, at one? Yeah. What time is it? 12.57. Okay. All right. Last thing, you say in the book, you have this great line, you say, writing is a hostile act. Right. And I think she didn't want to say certain things because it was hot. You are accusing people in print of things. But also she does have this sense that like there is that fundamental betrayal and aggressiveness in writing and telling somebody else's story. Yeah. And, you know, people have criticized her for having that approach, right? Like, oh, you know, the journalist shouldn't be thinking of it as confrontational or whatever.

1:01:49You should work with your subject, which, you know, I understand and agree. and I teach my journalism students to act with care and ethics about everyone they talk to. But the fact of the matter is someone has this whole life and you're just going to write about this one part of it, and that's a kind of killing off of the other parts. And people rarely like what is written about them, no matter unless you say that they are the second coming of Christ. Then you're not doing your job. Right, right. And then you're not doing your job anyways. So yeah, your obligation is to the truth, to your audience, not to your subject.

1:02:33And often, you know, depending on the circumstance, you know, she's going to tell that they're giving the toddlers acid in the commune, even though that's going to get people in trouble because the world needs to know that. And you have to be able to make those tough choices. Well, yeah, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, which means they're telling the story. Yes. And it's probably self-serving. Right. And now you're telling a story, which is your point of view and what you see it. And chances are that's going to be, those two stories are going to be in conflict. So there is inherently something aggressive

1:03:11and confrontational about telling the story. Yeah. Yeah. I always tell my, you know, I tell my students like, you don't, you know, don't burn your bridges on purpose, but it's probably going to happen. And, you know, your obligation is to, to get the story that needs to be told out there. Well, don't you think that's what she's saying in that commencement address? Like these platitudes about like plant a tree, we're all friends, you know, like the truth is the truth. These, the reality is complicated and feelings get hurt. And to throw yourself into the convulsions of the world is going to, is meaning, means if I say this thing, it's going to have negative consequences for some people, even if like that person could be evil, but I liked them when we're talking, or this person could be really nice and good, but totally incompetent.

1:04:02Or, you know, there's, there's all these different factors at play. And she sort of fearlessly wrote what she thought needed to be written. Right. Right. And, you know, and she, you know, ultimately went after people in positions of great power or, you know, cases of great injustice, like the central bar case. Yeah. It's like, as long as you're doing it, it's a hostile act and you're, you're punching up rather than down. It's probably, that's what you have to be concerned by. Is this person have power that I'm going after? Or is this just picking on an ordinary person who happens to be what ordinary people are, which is contradictory and hypocritical and all these other things?

1:04:43Right, right. I actually think that she really tried to speak. People think that she was such an elitist and I get it. But, you know, she always said that like her friends were the ones that hung out at the gas station and, you know, that the point of the notebooks was about the girl in the plaid silk dress, which, you know, was her, which was the bystander. I think that she and you know she criticized politicians because they weren't speaking for the people or to the people and they were betraying them so I feel like she was a good steward of those people at the gas station that she grew up with in Sacramento.

1:05:23I think so too well thank you very much this was amazing thank you so much Ryan I really appreciate it yeah

1:05:33Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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