Author Evelyn McDonnell On Joan Didion’s Life and Legacy (Pt 1)

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1:19Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:09Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Growing up in Sacramento, I don't know if there was that much to make me proud of being from Sacramento. I mean, I remember when the Kings were good and we played the Lakers, there was a lot of defensiveness when Phil Jackson said we were a cow town. And so there was always this sort of underdoggy sense of Sacramento, and then also a sense that was pretty slow and boring. But it's weird as I've gotten older, you think about where you're from differently. but I feel like it always did a bad job communicating how, what a kind of an interesting tradition it had.

2:57Supreme court justices were from Sacramento. Some of my favorite bands from Sacramento, a great novelist was from Sacramento or his wife's family was in Sacramento. And he based one of his novels in Roseville. I'm talking about my, that was someone I rave about here a lot, John Fonte, but then Joan Didion is from Sacramento, like really, from, from Sacramento. She has a great book called Where I Was From, but her family came to Sacramento with the Donner Party. So they go way, way back. And yet there was never a peep about this growing up. And so I came to Joan Didion sort of embarrassingly late, but she's become one of my absolute favorite writers and someone I've read all her stuff.

3:38And there's incredible stoked themes in Blue Nights, Year of Magical Thinking. Her essay on self-respect, I quote in Ego is the Enemy, I think, and a couple of my other books. I think she even has a great book about road tripping through the South. So I was very excited to see that Evelyn McDonald was publishing a book called The World According to Joan Didion. And I asked her if she wanted to come out and do the podcast. And she did. She's a professor of journalism at Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. She's a native Californian, an acclaimed journalist, essayist, critic, feminist, and someone I think uniquely suited to interpret Joan Didion and what she means and life lessons we can learn from her.

4:21Trace in her wonderful book, The World According to Joan Didion, which I read, my wife just read, it traces Didion's journey from Sacramento, Los Angeles, Malibu, Manhattan, Miami, and Hawaii. and you really get a sense of what made Joan Didion tick, what made her great, how she was flawed, her determination, her inherent lowercase stoicism, and then also the tragic nature towards the end of her life. And just the way fortune, you know, they say, don't count someone lucky till you know how it ends. And it was a rough go for Didion there at the end, which I talk about in this two-part episode with Evelyn McDonald.

5:04You can follow her on Twitter at Evelyn McDonald, and you can follow her on Instagram at MissLadyEvelyn, and you can check out her new book, The World According to Joan Didion, which we have signed copies of at The Painted Porch. You can grab it in audio or anywhere books are sold. Check it out.

5:27So I thought we'd start. I have what I think is my case for Joan Didion as a lowercase stoic, right? Like the sort of what we call like maybe American stoicism, that sort of pioneer lowercase stoicism. So a couple examples. One, in her famous self-respect essay, she has this great line. She says, character is the source from which self-respect springs, which I think is a lovely line. Right. And then there's the commencement address, which was mostly lost. And I read after I saw it in your book. As it actually happens, my in-laws were the class of 76 at Riverside. But they couldn't find out where she gave that because there's multiple colleges.

6:16They were like, we would have remembered if Joan Didion spoke at our commencement. But the address, she had this great, she was like, she was saying that, you know, our job or the job of a thinking person, she says, is to like sort of strip yourself of illusions and all the things you think about the world. Right. And that you have to get rid of those blinders because although it's easier to live in the world as you imagine it to be, you have to live in the world as it actually is. And to not deceive yourself about who you are and how other people are. I thought that was a beautiful idea. And then she has this other great line in that speech where she says you have to throw yourself into the convulsions of the world.

6:56Yeah. Right? We tend to think of intellectuals and now unfortunately we think of philosophers as these people who are apart from the world, just thinking about it in the literal ivory tower or not. But she's saying that you sort of have to throw yourself into it. And then I thought the last words she basically says to her husband are pretty stoic. They're leaving the hospital. Their daughter's in the hospital. He's struggling with his professional identity, his personal identity, his health isn't good. And he says, I don't think I'm up for this. And she says, you don't get a choice. Right, right.

7:35And then the last one, the most beautiful and haunting, which is a sort of memento mori exercise. She talks about this in Blue Nights. She's at the church watching her daughter get married. She's with her husband. It's the happiest moment of her life. And she sort of does this rumination about how none of the people know in this moment of peak happiness and peace, basically what fortune has in store for them. And that inside of what, a year, two years, two of them would be dead. Right. She would be a shell of herself. And that that's sort of what life does to a person. But what's so impressive is this little old lady basically is so tough and such a fighter that it doesn't break her.

8:22She has her biggest success ever after that. Sure. I mean, you're right. Yes. You're thinking. Yes. You know, she becomes famous in a way she never quite had before. That's right. I mean, like a best-selling kind of mainstream audience that, you know, a book that's like continually in print. Like there was still an element of kind of - It cements her legacy. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah, the job of the artist is to turn the worst thing that happens into them into art. Right. And she does that so profoundly beautifully with those two books. Yeah, yeah. Those are all great. You've zeroed in on key things, you know, that I wanted to get across in my book.

9:11Totally. And yeah. Because you think she's an interesting character in that looks are so deceiving, right? She looks tiny and frail. She comes from this privileged background. She's a writer, which we don't think of as necessarily a particularly hardy profession. And then she's successful at it from the beginning. Right. You know, incredibly successful, lives in this sort of rarefied world. but she was a tough lady. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I mean, she, you know, went to El Salvador during the midst of, you know, a extremely brutal war, you know, bodies on the street, um, and, you know, decay and, um, beheaded and, um, you know, uh, traveled, went on political campaigns, um, You know, rode the bus with all the other reporters.

10:16And yeah, she was kind of fearless. I love that, the throw yourself into the convulsions of the world. Because we do think of her as, because she was, she kind of kept to herself. And, you know, she also famously wrote about this, that I say very little so that people, in order to fill the gaps, the silence, start spilling the beans essentially, right? Start talking. And so she had this weird passivity to her, but she was doing what a journalist does, what a writer does. She was taking it in. Right, because we think of writers as observers fundamentally, but she wasn't, she was observing the pivotal moments of her time and she was involved in what was happening.

11:07Right. And yeah, I think as much as the world we're in now resembles that world, which is tumultuous and chaotic and sort of dark things on the fringes, it can be easy to retreat into ideas or theory or art, but the job of art is to reflect those problems back to us and hopefully present solutions or perspective, right? Right, right. Yeah. And I love, I mean, I think that one of the things, I mean, one of the reasons I wrote this book was to try to think about, you know, why has she had such staying power? Why does she seem to be reconnecting with, you know, generation after generation? I mean, I'm a younger generation than her for sure.

11:54Yeah. And now, you know, I teach journalism. My students are connecting with her and, you know, we see this, you know, in social media, right? Sure. The memes, whatever, the TikToks. I feel like, you know, journalism, it's the record of what, you know, it's the first draft of history. It's the record of what's happening, but then she was able to make it something more lasting so that we're still read Slouching Towards Bethlehem about, you know, San Francisco, Haydash Berry and, you know, the height of counterculture hippies. And it's still a view of that that goes against a lot of what was the mythology of Haydash Berry.

12:42Right. It's still enlightening. It's still enlightening enough that like Olivia Rodrigo writes a song based on a phrase from that. right? It is weird because there's this sort of resurgence of like psychedelics. And when you read, I got asked, I didn't end up doing it because I felt like I wasn't up for it, but they asked if I would do a forward to the electric Kool-Aid acid test. And I read it and I was like, how could anyone read this and not see how preposterous the claims people are making about these things to, you know what I mean? Like there's this narrative where it was like psychedelics were this sort of groundbreaking world changing sort of perspective shifting magic.

13:30And then like the repressive authorities shut it down. And then now it's like, we're rediscovering them. Right. But then you read like Didion or you read, uh, Tom Wolfe and you're like, it wasn't the, uh, the, uh, the paradise that maybe we are retroactively imagining that it was like people got themselves into a lot of trouble. Right. Right. Well, I mean, you know, certainly as Joan Didion wrote, giving them to a small children was not, and will never be a good idea. Um, you know, I mean, I, you know, I know, I certainly know people who, um, are microdosing or using mushrooms and say it helps them.

14:18Yeah. And, you know, it's, um, and I'm not going to criticize those choices, but I think to, um, to preach them as this panacea, Yeah. And to think that they're going to work for everybody and that they're not without possibly very dangerous side effects. And that's kind of what she was saying, I think, also in that commencement address, which is, you know, play in a tree, man, you know. And she's like, the world is very complicated and there aren't good solutions and fixing things is really hard. Right. And if you think there's this magic pill or this magic button or this magic technology that's going to fix all of it, you're fooling yourself.

15:04Yeah. And something I've discovered and write about in the book is that she gave a few of these speeches at universities that were really sort of pivotal moments for her. Like I felt like she was sort of testing out ideas in some ways in these speeches. And I think, you know, some of it has to do with that she was speaking to younger people. Yeah. And, you know, this is a woman who was, you know, not interested in teaching, you know, just never pursued that. You know, a lot of writers, obviously, like myself, work at a university. Not a path she ever considered. And, you know, she said that wasn't for her.

15:49and yet I think that she really, I always think of her as someone who was trying to pass on lessons and educate people in her speeches and then in the writing that there was always the sense of like, this is what I've learned about life and I want to share it with you. And, you know, and I think that she did that in her life too with mentoring and with parenting. um the the that speech the the Riverside speech um is when she really uh starts to talk about her turning away from the frontier mythology of the golden west the golden state of California that she as this you know fifth generation Californian um great great great great granddaughter of, you know, essentially, you know, of pioneers or, you know, gold rush, people came in the gold rush or settler colonizers or, you know, whatever you want to call them, right, that she was grown up with this mythology that, you know, was based in the reality of her life, but was also, you know, as she came to realize a kind of real honeycoating.

17:08This is actually one of the things that I found when I was at the University of Texas library the other day, was that she was working on a book about this for years. And she originally called it Fairy Tales, which tells you everything you need to know about what she thought about the way that California had been settled and had tried to sell itself to itself. And it was particularly about, you know, the gentry of California, the landed families, including her own explicitly. but she struggled with finishing that book and publishing it until both of her parents were dead and particularly her mother and then that becomes where I was from published like a year after her mother died and I think it was her mother was the one who gave her a notebook when she was at age five and told her to keep herself busy and, you know, the rest is history, right?

18:13If you want to be entertained, go write yourself a story. Yeah, right. What a great piece of parenting. Yes. It's so beautiful. Yeah, yes, absolutely. And so I feel like she really didn't want to betray her mother particularly. Yeah, I mean. I mean, it's interesting because I think of her as being so courageous and unsentimental, but she was not, I think she also had concerns about confronting her brother. I think, you know, family was so important to her, right? The family she was from, the family that she built, that I think sometimes she put that above her truth-telling. well I think it's a timeless thing right like I grew up in Sacramento I had sort of Reagan Republican parents you get some version of your state your country your class you know like what my dad was a cop you get these sort of the when Joan Didion says we tell ourselves stories in order to live she wasn't she meant like we lie to ourselves we tell ourselves narratives that allow us to see ourselves as the good guys.

19:36It justifies what we do. It justifies our place in the world. And it allows us to edit out the things that are uncomfortable or unpleasant or unfair. Right. And so the process of shedding that inherently means re-imagining people and places and decisions, and they don't always come out well. And I think that's, I mean, you go away to college, hopefully, or you move and you start to experience different perspectives. You read, your bubble is shattered a little bit, but it's a painful thing, I think, to have to realize that your parents weren't fully who you thought they were or the things they believed.

20:22Either they didn't really believe them or they didn't live up to them, right? Or, you know, maybe they weren't the good guys all the time, the way you want your parents or your grandparents to be. And for her to have like multiple generations of her family in the same place, sort of telling themselves this mythology, to have to face that would have been, you know, profoundly destabilizing, I imagine. Right. And, you know, she born and raised in Sacramento also. And, you know, her grandmother, you know, Genevieve Didion, I don't know if, you know, you were aware of who she was growing up there, but she was kind of a grand dam of old San Francisco on the school board for, you know, decades.

21:09And yes, so Joan grew up with also that, that legacy, that, you know, public figure, you know, but she was actually, she actually did write, but of course, long after Genevieve and her grandparents were dead. She did write pretty, um, witheringly of, of those grandparents in, in where I was from. Um, and you know, uh, one of, one of the things I write about in the book, um, was that her, her grandparents were very active in the golden sons and daughters of, or the native sons and daughters of the golden West, uh, which is this, um, you know, like order in California, like a Shriners kind of, a society.

21:47And you see their emblems everywhere in California. Like they, you know, they were dedicated to preserving the sort of the gold dust mythology, you know, the fairy tales. So Joan was, I'm sure, acutely aware of that. I mean, you know, one of her famous early essays is Notes from a Native Daughter. Yeah. You know, and then I was digging around in her grandparents' papers at the Center for Sacramento History. You know, white supremacy is just embedded in their statements of purpose. I found this whole passage about, you know, we have to keep the Asians out of California. So, you know, I think, but Joan, you know, Joan never explicitly addressed that, even though she had to have known it and other people addressed it.

22:44Lewis McAdams addressed it in his writing about the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West. You know, and I mean, she also ended up leaving California by that time also and spending the last decades of her life in New York. Like as much as she's identified, you know, Michiko Kakatani, California belongs to Joan Didion, she did like you say feel it was so important as a young woman to get away she came to new york first out of college and then spent her last days her last decades on her own in new york city

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26:29Yeah, I mean, you're seeing at large how as certain people tried to challenge certain ideas in American history, just the profound backlash that that generates. Because nobody wants to feel like their childhood was a lie, that the people they looked up to were not fully who they thought they were. Or, you know, that maybe they weren't the good guys that they thought they were. And that requires to be able to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time. That I love my grandmother, I love my grandfather, but they believed certain abhorrent things. Or their generation was complicit in horrible things happening.

27:11Or that inherently their success came at the expense of other people's success. or that they had opportunities that simultaneously other groups were deprived of, right? That's really unpleasant and scary. And usually the people who are in positions of influence are on the older side of things, right? Who heads up the historical commissions? Who heads up, you know, the school boards, et cetera. So you're asking or you are forcing people to reexamine things that they want to leave locked away. Right. Or that they want to have only fond thoughts about. Right. And that's one of the things that, you know, is really important to Joan's narrative that I think a lot of people have missed is that she did have that self-recommend.

28:01And, you know, a time before it was, you know, popular, right? And that that was really core. But it did take her decades. And, you know, there's, you know, I mean, and certainly, you know, there are things she wrote that are up for criticism. And she, you know, she definitely, you know. Yeah, what's that line about how she wishes she could vote for Barry Goldwater again? Yeah, yeah. And you can contrast that with the essay she wrote about her understanding of the police in her life. And you're like, wow, like, were these two simultaneous views or was she compartmentalizing? But she clearly was like all people wrestling with it.

28:36And she got there on some things and didn't get there on other. Right. Right. Yeah. So that was the police article was something I found that I've never seen anybody talk about that was published in the Saturday Evening Post in the late 60s. I think 68, 69, where she's like, you know, why I've come to hate cops. And she talks about police harassment of, you know, students and Mexicans in Los Angeles. Um, and, and Hawaii, um, and, and why does she know in Hawaii? Yes. Like the cops hassling these two kids on the street in Hawaii and that same cop energy, you know, and the, there weren't cell phone cameras, but a crowd was milling about watching what happened.

29:21She watched the cops just sort of do what cops still do to this day that we're still wrestling with as a society. and some people are pushing back against and some people are like back to blue. You know, like that exactly what she's talking about almost 50 years ago is still happening right now. People are still dealing with the cognitive dissonance of it. Yeah, and I do think that, you know, that essay has never been anthologized. It's never been talked about. Like, you know, there has been a careful curation of Joan's image, I think, you know, that she was, I'm sure, complicit in, but that I think those who are republishing her works now are continuing.

30:03But, you know, but it's also, I read that piece and I'm like, okay, now, you know, fast forward to 1991, the Central Park Five case, the trial of the young black and brown boys, because they were not of age, for the, you know, brutal assault of a jogger that her, she wrote about for the New York Review of Books, you know, in this incredible attack on systemic racism in the court system, in the police, and in the media. Sure. That, you know, now we realize was completely ahead of its time. but you know it took decades for that case to for someone else to come forward and admit that they had done the assault and for those youths to be exonerated well yeah you get these little that that process too of of leaving where you were from and getting a new worldview it's not it's not this epiphany where you suddenly get it right it's this slow process like I was just thinking about this one the other day it doesn't really have anything to do with what I'm talking And I remember I'd heard on the news there was something about how they wouldn't allow gay people in the Boy Scouts.

31:21And I asked my dad about it. And I was like, damn, why don't they allow like gay scout leaders? I saw it on the news. I read an article. And he tells me this thing about how, well, you know, they're concerned that gay people, maybe they're actually attracted to boys and it's just not safe. you know, he gives me the explanation at the time, the sort of, not the extreme, exaggerated, sort of bigoted view, but just the sort of status quo, most of the people, I mean, this is a state that in 2008 bans gay marriage, right? So just the normal view, I would say, of poorly informed people at that time of a stereotype, not even a stereotype, of a, what would you say?

32:06It's,

32:10anyways, a false view of a minority that they don't understand. Right. And then I remember, so I remember, okay, that's what it is. I listen to my parents. And then I go to college and I'm writing for the college newspaper at Riverside. And this Eagle Scout is giving a talk. And he's the Eagle Scout that they wouldn't allow become a scout leader that I'd heard about on the news as a kid. So all these years later, he's there. Wow. And he's giving this talk. And I go, wait, this isn't like a pedophile. This is like a kid. And he's telling his story. Right. And you, all I could flash back to was like, wait, this is not what my parents told me.

32:49It's more complicated than this, right? Joan Didion is saying, I get from my parents this sense of what cops are. And then I witness on the street what cops can do. Right. And it doesn't add up. Right. And then your mind just starts working on this problem, right? Right, right. And you start to question. You've got this little peek behind the curtain or the mask has slipped just a little bit. Right. And then, you know, lo and behold, actually the whole time, there's a massive pedophilia scandal brewing inside the Boy Scouts of America that has nothing to do with gay people. And kids actually were vulnerable and exposed this whole time because as it happens that most accusations are confessions, right?

33:32Right, right. And so I think about my evolution from the things my parents told me and their relatively conservative beliefs to where I am now. It's this process of, you know, it's not quite adding up and you have to come up with a new paradigm, a new way of organizing the information that you see in the world, your values, your sense of other people. and yeah you get the sense that she got a pretty regressive uh uh sense of the world from her parents and their legacy and then as she goes out and explores and writes and comes up and close up close and personal with all different kinds of people it's it's not sufficient and she has to reimagine what the world is and what right and wrong are and what america is and she that's what that's the evolution that you see reflected in the writing.

34:23And that's what we have to undergo as people also, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. I say in the book that, you know, she, she constantly refused satisfaction. She wasn't going to, you know, just be happy with her understanding of the world. And, you know, that's, that's the throwing yourself into the convulsions of the world. And I like what you said before about, and it's not just intellectually that But she was also out there witnessing these things, you know, whether it's hate Ashbery or cops harassing students, hippies on the street in Hawaii. She was going to go to Vietnam. Right. She wanted to go to Vietnam famously that, you know, she got hired by Life magazine to write a column.

35:10And she's like, I think it was 1971. And she's like, great. What's the most important thing going on in the world? I need to go write about Vietnam. And her editor's like, no, no, no. We have the boys taking care of that. You write something else. And so, you know, she goes to Hawaii and, you know, writes her famous opening line. I'm, you know, sitting in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. In lieu of getting a divorce. Yeah, in lieu of filing for a divorce. You know, and I tell you this in order to tell you exactly who I am and why I am and where I am. which is, you know, brilliant, key to what was important about her journalism, the journalism of the time, that, you know, foregrounding of personal point of view, the overthrowing of objectivity is, you know, the old standard of journalism.

36:06And of saying, you know, this is who I am. And it's, again, that thing like we tell ourselves stories in order to live. And she's saying, and we have to be aware, we have to constantly be aware of the choices we've made in making those narratives and what we're leaving out. And so she's, you know, she's saying there, this is my story. This is what I've decided to stay to say. And you can understand me and decide whether you trust me and want to read me and believe what I'm going to tell you. In meditations, Mark Sreya says, we have to strip things of the legend that encrusts them. And there's marketing, there's hype, there's narrative, there's racism, there's nationalism.

36:57There's all these forces acting on our stories or our sense of the world. And it requires a certain clarity and confidence and like restraint, I think also, to kind of put each one up for the test and go, well, is this true? Is this fully true? You know, and yeah, she's not just, Joan Didion doesn't just go, hey, what myths about California aren't true? Or how is America not, you know, the shining city on a hill the way that we want it to be? Right. But she also goes and goes, hey, what is this like, this sort of, what are the hippies talking about? And is it as wonderful as they think it is? Right.

37:36You know, or is it actually darker and more disturbed and depraved than they want to admit? So she's a sort of equal opportunity stripper of – equal opportunity remover of legends and myths and sort of disabuser of self -serving impressions. Yeah, absolutely. And you can see it like when she's writing about the doors in the 60s and sitting in on the recording session and – And they're arguing over their lunch order and stuff. Yeah, and it's just, you know, and Jim Morrison's like not there for the longest time. And it's just, you know, mind numbingly dead. Like there's nothing happening. And, you know, the last line is like, I decided not to see it through.

38:28Like she's just like, forget it. Like I'm not going to be part of this weird rock and roll hype machine that actually just seems kind of lame. and, you know, and completely narcissistic. You know, she's writing about Jim Morrison, like, lighting the match and holding it to his crotch. And then, you know, decades later, she's covering political campaigns and conventions for the New York Review of Books. And she's talking about the extreme disconnect between the political discourse from everybody, from, you know, both parties, from, you know, from the pundits as well, from the media. And that becomes, you know, political fictions, right?

39:19Which the title of the essay says itself in the book, which also wins her, you know, prize, the Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting, like that, you know, very, but, you know, what she learned covering the counterculture of the 1960s, she decades later applies to the establishment, the government. Yeah. How does she bear it all though? Like I think what's so haunting about Blue Nights and A Year of Magical Thinking is just this sort of back-to-back blows. I mean, she loses her husband and her daughter and in short order. and how does she get out of bed in the morning? Yeah, right. Well, she doesn't, right?

40:06I mean, your magical thinking, she chronicles how she basically can't function for really like nine months after his death that she just doesn't know what to do with herself and she can't put his shoes away and the dictionary is still open to the page he left it on, which, you know, she's so good at those telling details, right? And she, you know, sort of dedicates herself to trying to understand what mourning and grieving is and to reading about it. And in doing so, she does eventually come to terms with it. And then what she does is she sits down at her typewriter. and what she hadn't been able to do.

40:58And she types. And in three months, she writes The Year of Magical Thinking. Yeah. At the same time, of course, that Quintana is also in and out of hospitals, comas, rehab, and then winds up dying after Joan has finished The Year of Magical Thinking. Right. Yeah, she thinks this book is the chronicle of the worst year of her life. And it's like, life is like, wait, there's more coming. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can remember, you know, when the book came out and reading, you know, New York Times interview with her. And, you know, they were like, why, you know, after you finished the book, Quintana died.

41:48Did you think about going back and updating it or, you know? And she's like, no, it's finished. It was finished, which is interesting. Of course, then she does go back several years later to write about Quintana specifically. Although she writes a lot about Quintana in your magical thinking too. There's that old story about how you're not supposed to count someone happy until you know how it ends. You know, like you compare yourself to someone, you look at someone's story and you think they're so blessed, they get all the breaks. Right. And then, but you don't know how it ends. And there's something haunting about Joan Didion's story in that, yeah, she's born to this wealthy family.

42:28You know, she gets a job right out. Basically the only adversity she goes through for the good chunk of her life is that she didn't get into Stanford when she wanted to, right? Right, right. And then, you know, and as tough and sexist as the media world was at that time, she's like the one they allow through. You know, she gets the great jobs. Her books are a huge success. And, you know, she lives in a mansion in Malibu. She lives in a multi-million dollar apartment in New York City. I mean, she, you would, there were, I imagine many, many people who didn't like Joan Didion because she was so lucky and so successful.

43:07Right. And that, that her life was a dream. Right. And neither she nor they understand what is sort of waiting in the wings. And that's what she so hauntingly writes about in that scene in Blue Nights about how, you know, at this church in New York City, everyone thinks it's, it's amazing. And it's always going to be like this. And none of them know. Right. That as she says, you don't have a choice, good or bad. You don't like something, you know, you don't get a choice. Life, life, life deals you things. And then she gets those two back to back blows. Right. Right. I will say that, that on the surface, her life looked great.

43:47And, and, and sure, you know, it was. And, you know, she got to live in beautiful places and had certainly a lot of privilege, you know, but she did from a very early age deal with her father's alcoholism and mental illness. You know, he was hospitalized when she was in college and mental institute. And, you know, they were displaced when she was young because of the war. And that was when she started getting migraines, which she wrote a lot about. And, you know, obviously she wrote a lot about having, you know, what we now call mental health issues, which I think is part of why people really relate to her today, because we're all going through that now when we talk about it pretty openly.

44:34And she did it, did that decades ago. Right. And she was also, you know, going through gynecological issues and apparently wasn't able to have a child. I mean, she never really says exactly why this happened, but based on my research, I'm sure it must have been gynecological reasons. And then so they adopt Quintana, but as she describes the Blue Knights, it was difficult, right? It was difficult to have an adopted child and to be two writers. And they adopted Quintana just as Joan's career particularly was taking off. And the marriage, it was not going well. They were, you know, in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Lua filing a divorce.

45:29They did not file a divorce, but, you know, they were apart for times. John was living in Vegas and she was in Malibu. And, you know, Quintana had mental health issues as well, right, throughout her life.

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47:56Well, maybe that's a good way to think about it, right? Because people think maybe, how would I deal with something like that? Right? Like this sort of hammer blows of this terrible, the worst thing that could happen to a person. And the answer, I think the Stoics would say, this is this great passage in meditations where Mark Sreos is going, you know, how do you, how do I know like how I'm going to deal with tomorrow? Right. With the same weapons that you met today with. Right. And I think his point was that you've been tested and challenged in ways that maybe felt small to you, but are actually are preparing you for what could happen.

48:38So, yeah, sure, Joan Didion is privileged and a bunch of things. She gets a bunch of wonderful breaks. But, yeah, she has this sort of rough childhood. She has a hysterectomy. She doesn't get into the college that she wanted, which, you know, like if it's devastating to you at the time, it's devastating to you at the time. Right. Like, but what this is doing, these are things that are making you stronger and more resilient if you let them. Right. Like you're developing a sense of your capacities and what you're capable of and you're learning lessons. And then that's what you draw on when things really get bad.

49:23You're able to go, well, how have I handled things in the past? And that's how I'll have to handle this in the future. And so I think we all have those things in our life that we can draw on and use. And so, yeah, you don't have to be this person who, you know, I had my army amputated or I was, you know, I escaped genocide. And that's how I know I can handle it. Like we all have things that are shaping and informing us. And if we let them make us more resilient and stronger when we need them. Yeah. And your magical thinking is in many ways, I think, a meditation on sort of a self-chiding of that she was not prepared enough.

50:09Yes. Right? A lot of it, she's like, there were all these signs. Yeah. I mean, you know, her husband had had many heart procedures, right? And he had not been, he'd been out of sorts for months. And, you know, and then, you know, Quintana also. Okay, who, you know, since when is a marriage actually, you know, it's out of a screwball comedy. No, marriage is not actually the happy ending. It's always tough. Right? Yeah. It's just the beginning. You know what I thought was really interesting? sort of moving and eye-opening is she says, you know, so he basically falls dead at the table. It could have been this table.

50:48I don't know. He falls dead at the table. She could have been, wow. Yeah. And she rushes to the fridge and there's a list of phone numbers, like emergency numbers on the fridge, which she said, I wrote in case somebody had a problem in the building, Right. Like she knew emergencies could happen, but she had zero conception that emergencies or tragedy could befall her. Like all of us, she got comfortable and felt immune and just did it. Magical thinking is also not wanting to think about stuff happening to you. You can imagine it happening to your neighbor. Right. You can imagine it happening historically, but then you, you're like, you hear a friend gets a cancer diagnosis and you're there for them, but you don't, you don't want to go, but that's going to happen to me.

51:46Right. And that's, I think, where she's chiding herself about not having been prepared for. She just, like, I think very reasonably got comfortable and you don't want to invite unpleasantness into your life. Right. And I do think that, I mean, I think that there had been a lot of struggle for them for years, particularly with Quintana. and, you know, with their own careers and figuring out where they were going to live. And they really were, you know, in a great position at that time. They were both extremely accomplished. They were the king and queen of, they had been the king and queen of the L.A.

52:30literary scene. And then they also became it in New York, which is, you know, even more whatever, the center of publishing. And, you know, and yeah, Yeah, Quintana seemed happy. And then - There's this illusion of stability that we all have. Right. Right. Like I heard someone once say, it's like wood chips or things accumulating on the surface of the ocean. It looks like you could step on it. Right. Like it looks strong, but you would fall in immediately. There's this kind of illusion of stability. Right. And obviously the pandemic was a big reminder for all of us of like, Like you think, like I had all these plans.

53:10I was opening, we closed on and we're opening the bookstore or starting the construction on the bookstore in January and February of 2020. So you have this plan. You're like, can I afford it? Here's what it should look like. Here's how I imagine it going. And you have this sort of, you have this somewhat expanded notion of what you're willing to consider, what could go wrong. Hey, it could take a little bit longer than we thought. it could cost a little bit more than we thought. But you don't consider the world could collapse. Right. Right. There's these things that you just don't want to think about, right, as you're making plans because it feels like to open that is to, you know, open something that can never be closed, right?

53:56Right, right. The Stoics talk about this idea of premeditatio malorum or like a premeditatio. You have to think about it. He says exile, Seneca says exile, war, torture, shipwreck. He says, all the terms of the human lot should be before our eyes. And as it happens, pretty much all these things happen to him at one time, not immediately, not tomorrow, but over the course of a life. Like if you live a long time, if you're lucky, a lot of bad stuff will happen to you. That's just probability. You know what I mean? If you make it into your 80s, you're going to experience some real shit. Right, right.

54:30And she does. Yes. So are we not allowed to rest on our laurels ever? I mean, I think it's a balance, right? The tension between considering all the possibilities and not being tortured by anxiety and uncertainty and all the things. Like how do you not be caught off guard and at the same time not cripple yourself with all that is possible? That's the real tension that we have to figure out how to strike. Right. It's when you were talking about the COVID and pandemic. And I always think back to I had just moved to Miami and my husband and I went to the beach and were in the ocean. And I'd just gotten this great job at the Miami Herald and his daughters were with us.

55:23And it just seemed like this beautiful moment. and we go back to the house and it was September 11th, 2001. Right. And, you know, we get a phone call and turn on the news. And, you know, and it's like, yeah. You can change like that. But I'm also glad that I had that, you know, those 15 minutes of being, you know, at peace that I could say maybe we'll get back to that someday. Well, it's this tension between being proactive and prepared and also present. Right. So Seneca, it's funny because Seneca is talking about how you should consider all this stuff. But then he also says, he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than it's necessary.

56:08Right. He says the problem is we often suffer more in our imagination than in reality. Right. So like, that's the tricky part about even being a parent is like, you have to think about things happening to your kids. And if all you're doing is thinking about the things that can happen to your kids, you're not being there for your kids in the moment where everything is fine. Right. And so to be able to do both things simultaneously is really the thing. Right. That's something I was so haunted by in Blue Nights. And you talk about it in your book too, but, you know, people will go, but you have your memories, right?

56:43Right. And you have these mementos. And she was finding, Joan Didion was finding that she would go through the photo album. What she wasn't thinking about is, oh, it's so amazing. We went to Disneyland. It was so amazing. We went to Hawaii, all these things. She was saying, all I can think about is how I wasn't present then. That she had it, but she wasn't there for it. And the hauntingness of, yeah, you'll always have memories and no one can take the memories away. but as you reflect on this moment will the memory be that i experienced the thing or will you be kicking yourself because you didn't right experience the thing because you were worried about x y or z you were trying to do two things at the same time you know you were tired whatever right and so that that it that's something that i think keeps me up is it's just like am i actually am I actually being here for these moments, ordinary and extraordinary?

57:41Right, right. And I mean, it's, you know, it's the lament of the working parent. Yes. Right. And, you know, I think this is one of the big questions about Joan Didion was, you know, was she a good mom? Everybody asked me that. Was she a good mom? And, you know, I kind of hate that question because, you know, it's really not fair. They don't ask it of the male writers quite so often. Yeah, exactly. That's what I say in the book. They don't ask John Gregory Dunn whether he was a good dad. Nobody ever says that, right? I mean, they were there together.

58:17But, you know, I think clearly in Blue Nights, she asks Quintana, do you think I was a good mom? I mean, clearly, you know, Joan was someone who, again, her success started right when she adopted Quintana. Yeah. And, you know, Quintana wrote these, you know, had the notes that things that her mom said. And, you know, one is like, go away. I'm working. Oh, yeah. Shush. Mommy's working. Yeah. Shush, I'm working. Which is, you know, it's interesting because it's also the like what her mom said to her. I'm taking care of your brother. Here's a notebook. Go write. I also know that Joan and John doted on Quintana, that they really, you know, they took her everywhere.

59:01where they clearly loved her very, very much. And, you know, actually, Quintana was probably pretty spoiled in a lot of ways, right? You know, God rest her soul. But, yeah, I mean, as a working mom, a writing mom, that struggle of, you know, are we giving enough attention? And that's, Joan's just full of those regrets of like, did I not pay enough attention to the signs? Did I not realize just how troubled she was? And I think that's the haunting-ness of any sort of loss or grief is you go, well, it's gone now. Did I appreciate it while I had it? Right. Did I prioritize the right things while I had it?

59:53And I think one of the reasons that it's good to read a book like A Year of Magical Thinking or Blue Nights or to walk through a tombstone or walk through a graveyard and see the tombstones of people who died sooner than they would have liked or, you know, you see those little grays for children. Like what that hopefully does is give you a chance to reflect on those things when you can still do something about it. Right. Do you know what I mean? Right. Um, like how, how, if your husband or your wife or your dad or your mom keeled over dead at your kitchen table and you're spending those next several months sorting through the wreckage of that, you know, what would you wish you would do differently then?

1:00:40Right. How do you walk yourself through that exercise now and then hopefully make some of those changes now? Like there's a stoic exercise where you're supposed to go, think of yourself as dead. You know, you've lived your whole life. You know, it's gone. And now you've come back to life and you get to live the rest of your life now. And they say, live that properly. And so there's something, I think, to me, the real service of those books and the service of anyone, And you have a friend that gets cancer. You have a friend who loses someone in a car accident. And you go, if that were me, what changes would I make?

1:01:19Well, that is you. You just have slightly more time. And how do you make some of those changes now when it could, you know, make a difference? Right, right. Yeah. So it's magical thinking that Joan says is what she did after John died, which is basically thinking that he wasn't dead. Like convincing herself that if she left his shoes out, he would come back to put them on. And this is for someone who had a very orderly mind and was a pretty rational thinker, I would say, overall, right? And so this was cataclysmic for her to go into this suspended reality. So is it her sort of trying to, that she hadn't done that?

1:02:14She hadn't imagined what life would be like without John or without her or without Quintana and her having to come to terms with that? Yeah, maybe. I mean, I don't think any of us do it enough. Right. You know, like we all take a certain stability for granted because to contemplate the ephemerality and the unpredictability of life, ironically, that's what feels destabilizing. Right, right. Right? Like, so we'll contemplate as she did. I want these emergency numbers in case somebody else in the building has a tragedy. We can conceive of the fact that bad things happen all the time. Right. They just don't happen to us.

1:02:57Right. She was president of the co-op of her building. So that was probably part of like her job as president of the co-op, right? Yeah. She knows people's spouses, particularly people her age sometimes die, right? Right, right. And then they get rushed to the hospital. You hear it, you know? Anyone who lives anywhere, you're like, oh, did you hear what happened like down the street? You wake up, there's all those sirens, but it just, it doesn't happen to people like me. Right. It doesn't happen to me. Right. And it does, you know, it does. And are you living in a way that, because you can't eliminate it entirely, but it eliminates or minimizes that potential for, you know, really kicking yourself or really hating yourself or really, you know, how much did you leave on the table?

1:03:46It's minimizing how much you leave on the table. Right. Right. And she talks about like, I mean, she had seen this happen, as you say, with so many people she knew. And, you know, there was a there was a lot of tragedy in John's side of the family with her niece get murdered. Yeah, his niece was murdered by her boyfriend, a famous Hollywood trial. And, you know, one of John's brothers committed suicide. And so it wasn't that she didn't see this. In her own family, you know, her parents lived pretty long lives. And her brother actually did, her younger brother did die just shortly before she did, which is, you know, this also weird thing where she was just so alone at the end in terms of family and which is, you know, just incredibly tragic because as I said, family was just so, so, so important to her.

1:04:40But, you know, she did have, you know, obviously she did have her nieces and nephews and her agent and her editor and, you know, friends like Calvin Trillin around her. Like she had those alternative families or expanded families. But there is this, you know, one of the last chapters, the second last chapters is called Diner. Yeah. Because I, you know, went to this diner that she used to go to and talk to the waiter and about, you know, how she used to go there with John and Quintana. And then, you know, one day she showed up alone and then she showed up alone from then on, right? Which is also, Andrew Bird wrote a song called Lone Didion, which is also based on that same image.

1:05:26Like he knew someone who worked at the diner and told him this story. So here's this woman who, I mean, you know, she married John in 1964 and they had, you know, obviously problems in their marriage, but they were completely a partnership. They edited each other's work and wrote screenplays together. And they took Quintana with them everywhere for better or for worse. And then at the end, she's alone in the diner. But she's also, again, like we said before, very strong. Yeah. Yeah, there's two ways to look at that. Joan Didion at the end of her life sitting alone in a diner. And one is that it's sad and tragic.

1:06:15And the other is that it's inspiring and strong and just the sheer endurance of it. And I think about her even, you know, those last years, because she lives into the pandemic and she has to, you know, she's just soldiering on. Right, right, right. She just keeps on going. Right, right. Though she was pretty ill those last few years and, you know, was not mobile. Well, that's what I mean. I mean, she just, she kept waking up and, you know, didn't quit. And just like, there is this, like, not everyone's end is glamorous and exciting. It can be this sort of slow deflating of a balloon, you know, but she infuses that somehow with a kind of a dignity and a strength.

1:07:07than that kind of lowercase stoicism of like, this is what life is for me now. And she, you know, she just keeps going. Right, refusing to give up, you know, she dies of Parkinson's and it's, you know, robbed her of something. And you see that, you know, there's the documentary that Griffin Dunn, her nephew made about her, which is, you know, I think a really important part of why she came back in the public consciousness. and you can see in it that she has the start of Parkinson's. You know, she's very, very frail and her hands are shaking, but she's also just really there and has this little smile and this light in her eyes.

1:07:57I'm so grateful to him for having captured her in those, you know, last moments of her being able to do something like that. Is there something haunting too about the fact that it's like you can become incredibly successful and powerful and rich and well-respected and famous? And a fashion icon into your 80s. Yeah, and all these things. And also like you don't really own any of those things. They can all sort of be taken from you. And that like life is sort of equal opportunity when it comes to cruelty and misfortune. And you know what I mean? Like none of those things shield her from the tragedies that eventually befall her through no fault of her own.

1:08:45Do you know what I mean? Like I'm sure it made it easier in some, like it could have been worse, right? She could have also been impoverished or not had healthcare or whatever, right? It could have been worse. Right. But like at the end of the day, we all, I think it's the Epicurian said, we all live in an unwalled city. You know, we're all sort of vulnerable to these things happening. Right, right. Even if you're in, you know, a doorman building on the Upper East Side. Yeah.

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