Joan, I turn to you for straight talk. You say writing is the ability to change reality, change the beginning, change the end, to upend death and make immortal. Yup, yup, so let’s dive in and do just that. When you say the year of magical thinking, I’m going balls to the wall and magical it’s gonna be. I think I’m safe to say that if there’s anyone in the literary world (alive or dead) who won’t bullshit me, it’s Joan Didion (well, maybe Orwell). I remember reading Slouching in college and a friend goes, she’s so severe, and I said, yes, it’s delicious. Joan’s delicious severity. Serve it up now.
“I’m not telling you to make the world better,
because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package.
I’m just telling you to live in it.
Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it.
To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances.
To make your own work and take pride in it.
To seize the moment.
And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
—Joan Didion
Photograph: Duane Michals
