![The essayist and novelist Joan Didion was suspicious of insincerity and woolly thinking](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/12/24/TELEMMGLPICT000281427788_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqziruzzVJwPhgU4QMyGVuQoPRlug3rZRn-U4VSSReJ40.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![The essayist and novelist Joan Didion was suspicious of insincerity and woolly thinking](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/12/24/TELEMMGLPICT000281427788_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqziruzzVJwPhgU4QMyGVuQoPRlug3rZRn-U4VSSReJ40.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Joan Didion’s transition over the last couple of decades from respected writer to cultural icon has left some of her older readers somewhat baffled. There has never been any question that she deserves a place in literary history as a pioneer in the 1960s of the “New Journalism”, endowing reportage with novelistic depth; but even her most devoted admirers would not have predicted 20 years ago that she would become an object of veneration to late-Generation-X-ers and millennials.
Didion’s death on December 23 at the age of 87 has led to an outpouring of grief on social media. I don’t recall the passing of her fellow New Journalist Tom Wolfe a couple of years ago setting Twitter a-sighing and a-sobbing in the same way; it is more reminiscent of the reaction to the death of the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was similarly elevated late in life to the status of female liberal role model.
Latterly, Didion was not just admired but worshipped. It became possible to buy tote-bags bearing quotations from her books, clutch bags with her covers hand-stitched on, even a motorcycle jacket with her face on. The Vogue website ran items from her famous reporter’s “packing list” as a shopping slideshow. The octogenarian author became so fashionable that in 2015 she was invited to become the face of the French luxury label Céline.
Yet one wonders how thoroughly the Didion fan-girls and -boys have read her collected works. To start with, the transformation of the opening line of her essay The White Album – “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” – into an upbeat meme suggests a lack of familiarity with a work that warns against the easy consolations of neat narratives that draw bogus meanings and morals from a messy, complex reality.
Those older readers must wonder how much overlap there is between what they remember as Didion’s values and those of her young acolytes. How many people carrying a Didion tote-bag around would agree with her analysis of the over-simplifications of the mainstream feminist movement? (“To those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.”)
![Didion died this week at the age of 87](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/12/24/TELEMMGLPICT000281427762_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwSX5rhseiWKOo9p9OQ-ymek.jpeg?imwidth=350)
It seems vanishingly unlikely that Didion would have attained her current iconic status if she had not denounced George W Bush and the War on Terror, and expressed (qualified) admiration of Obama. But she had once been a card-carrying Republican, who would not vote for Richard Nixon in the 1962 primary because he was too liberal.
Many of her early essays were written for the journal regarded as the house magazine of the Republicans, William F Buckley’s National Review. In 1967 the Saturday Evening Post commissioned what was to become one of her most famous essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a grim account of her encounters with the supposedly utopian counter-cultural community of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco: the Post’s editors were so sure of what her attitude to them would be that they had prepared the cover picture of a leering hippie before she had filed the piece.
In the middle stage of her career she largely abandoned reportage and became better-known as a novelist, screenwriter, script doctor and film critic. Her conservative opinions baffled the liberal circles in which she moved, and her skewering of the pieties of actors earned her thorough dislike. She hymned John Wayne, scorning those members of the metropolitan elite who laughed at The Duke’s noble death scene in The Alamo, and attacked Woody Allen for apparently regarding nobody except West Side middle-class intellectuals as worth making films about.
Nevertheless an apparent political shift came about when Robert Silvers, the editor of the Left-leaning New York Review of Books, persuaded her to return to reporting. Her articles on the death squads of El Salvador and Cuban immigrants in Miami – which were expanded into the books Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987) – suggested increasing Left-wing sympathies. She became the first member of her family to register as a Democrat.
Her Left-leaning fans could have happily assumed that Didion’s early enthusiasm for the far-Right Republican Barry Goldwater was a youthful fad – as the supporters of former “Goldwater girl” Hillary Clinton do - if Didion hadn’t refused to go along with them. “Had Goldwater remained the same age and continued running, I would have voted for him in every election thereafter,” she said in 2001.
![Didion with husband John Gregory Dunne and daughter Quintana Roo](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/12/24/TELEMMGLPICT000281427798_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq44rdSC6sTNv0-awk2LQJvkR8YSybYNWDTYrGStsI8ko.jpeg?imwidth=350)
She maintained that it was not her politics that changed, but the Republican Party, which, in embracing the ex-actor Ronald Reagan, embarked on a path of folksy fakery that was anathema to her. What she had most loathed about the Sixties was the mindless belief that history could be ignored in the construction of new utopias – “those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring” – and she was too intellectually honest to subsequently give a pass to the Reagan era’s mythologising of America’s past in the service of a nostalgia-based patriotism.
The problem, once again, was stories: the creation of neat narratives. As her book Political Fictions (2001) shows, this was a tactic favoured by politicians on both the Right and the Left – although she increasingly saw no meaningful distinction between them.
She excoriated Nancy Reagan for needing three takes to deadhead a flower when she was supposedly being filmed doing spontaneous gardening; she also complained about a supposedly unplanned, but in reality carefully choreographed, game of catch between the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and one of his aides. The problem was that nobody involved seemed to admit to themselves that they were conniving in an act of fakery; instead there was an unspoken understanding about “a repeated moment witnessed by many people, all of whom believed it to be a setup and yet most of whom believed that only an outsider, only someone too ‘naive’ to know the rules of the game, would so describe it.”
Her acidulous put-downs were not confined within party lines. Dick Cheney was “the ninth-grade bully in the junior high lunchroom, the one sprawled in the letter jacket so the seventh-graders must step over his feet”; but Bill Clinton bore “the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent”.
![Didion in 1977](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/12/24/TELEMMGLPICT000001722069_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqZb52lyTd4NKJi29OdV0Lf68qlnShz6fdXmwYrz4IYtQ.jpeg?imwidth=350)
“This was not a mind that could be productively engaged on its own terms,” she wrote of the Republican Newt Gingrich; of the writings of Bob Woodward, hero of liberal journalists, she declared: “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”
One suspects that she would not have been all that impressed with the degree of rigour in the thinking of the younger generation that embraced her when her loathing of Bush happened to chime with theirs. She may have endorsed Obama, but she was bewildered by those who seemed to regard him as a potential Messiah: “Irony was now out. Naïveté, translated into ‘hope’, was now in,” she observed.
When she switched to political commentary, Didion remained what she had been since the Sixties, a cool, ruthlessly honest observer: she saw it as her business to expose politicians’ folly, not to provide a blueprint for a better alternative. (“It seems to me that my role only extends as far as trying to tell the story in some straight way. I’ve never been good at answers,” she told one interviewer.)
This makes her easy to misinterpret and misrepresent. Like Orwell, she is co-opted by people of diametrically opposed politics to endorse their viewpoints; because, like Orwell, she was congenitally incapable of ignoring cant and hypocrisy, however much this alienated her from those who might be considered her natural allies.
Above all, she was clear-eyed enough to know that to allow herself to lie in a good cause would have been pointless as well as self-corrupting, because writers do not change things. “I think of political writing as in many ways a futile act,” she said in 2005. “[But] you are obligated to do things you think are futile. It’s like living.”
Joan Didion skewered fashionable pieties like no other essayist
The American writer, who has died aged 87, latterly became an icon (and a tote bag) for millennials. They can’t have read much of her work