Didion Isn't as Cool as You Think

Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions

I hosted my recovery-writing workshop last night and we finally got around to Didion’s The White Album, which I still love despite all the white lady cliches.1 I use it as an example of how lack of transitions doesn’t really detract from the reading experience, and can even be an intentional reflection of a fragmented time (and all memoirs are fragmented, unless they’re lying).

I read The White Album in my twenties and it gave me direction. I wanted be her. Now, I recognize her coolness as the result of enormous effort and great personal cost. In her later work, she wrote about this exchange more directly, life having forced her into what cannot be turned into distant events: loss, aging. But grief and loss and uncertainty have been with her the whole time.

Just like they have been for me, despite my efforts to smooth things into an acceptable shape.

Her famous packing list is often presented as aspirational. I saw it that way for decades, using it as a yardstick for my own stylishness or lack thereof, always aware of how my body’s curves deny me the streamlined minimalism she carried out of her suitcase and into the world.

Today, it’s easier for me to see that list as somewhat self-conscious parody. Fashion blogs’ instructional versions of “How to Dress Like Joan Didion.” (See here, here, and here. And here!) often leave off Didion’s comments on her own list, or end it with just the first paragraph after:

This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.

Even that commentary shows us the limits of self-mastery, if we care to look: the bourbon, going wherever she’s sent. However, the paragraph after really undoes the tight discipline of what came before.

There is on this list one significant omission, one article I needed and never had: a watch. I needed a watch not during the day, when I could turn on the car radio or ask someone, but at night, in the motel. Quite often I would ask the desk for the time every half hour or so, until finally, embarrassed to ask again, I would call Los Angeles and ask my husband. In other words I had skirts, jerseys, leotards, pullover sweater, shoes, stockings, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil, mohair throw, typewriter, legal pads, pens, files and a house key, but I didn’t know what time it was. This may be a parable, either of my life as a reporter during this period or of the period itself.

Maybe fashion blogs leave this part out because none of us need a watch anymore—we have our phones. Or we have a fitness tracker or a watch we use as more than just a watch. We are tracking more than time, constantly. We always can know more. These devices tether us to schedules, give us direction, keep us from getting lost. But we’re always adrift. My watch is definitely a device for counting, measuring, comparing, disciplining my body, determining where I should be. Still, the numbers are never truly accurate. Schedules are fluid. The GPS can get us lost. My body does what it wants.

When Didion doesn’t have a watch, she is forced to reach out to people: the front desk, her husband. Didion reached for connection when she couldn’t control the time. I want measurement but it is always, in some way, a lie. Human connection is terrifying for me. For years and years, I’d rather look at my lying watch. But when I do, what I look for is missing.

Now I know there is a gift in remembering what we don’t have—in knowing that we don’t know what time it is, in having to ask someone else.

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I’ve spent years trying to structure my life the way Didion structured her sentences—precise, controlled, seamless. But life doesn’t work that way, and neither does writing. The real challenge isn’t finding the perfect system—it’s learning to move through uncertainty without freezing up or burning out. That’s what my new workshop, The Slow Burn, is about: building a sustainable creative practice that doesn’t rely on feeling in control all the time. If that sounds like something you need, I’d love for you to join me. Find out more here.