Joan Didion deserves better 

This book is an example of a regrettable new trend – the solipsistic biography. I mean lives of famous people written by unfamous people (usually women) who want to tell you a LOT about themselves. This one is about the writer Joan Didion by an academic called Evelyn McDonnell who never met Didion but believes that they had much in common. Here is her evidence. ‘She was born within one year of my mother; I was born within two years of her daughter. We are both native daughters of California. We lived in New York at the same time, though she was an Upper East Side celebrity and I was a Lower East Side punkette. We both wrote in order to live. We both thought about the sea whenever we felt troubled.’

Soul sisters, right? What McDonnell fails to have noticed is that Didion was a fastidious writer who would never describe herself and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, as ‘peers and equals’ because she would avoid tautology. She didn’t waste words. She taught herself to type by copying out stories by Hemingway because she admired his style. McDonnell of course disapproves of Hemingway. In many ways she disapproves of Didion too because she voted for Barry Goldwater in l964 and wrote for the National Review. Worse still, she was not a feminist. Didion admired strong men, like the actor John Wayne, and writers Norman Mailer and Hemingway. And she wrote a fierce article about the women’s movement in 1972 that accused it of ‘little sophistries, wish-fulfilment, self-loathing and bitter fantasies’. McConnell feels that Didion ‘needed some feminist consciousness-raising’.

Luckily we don’t have to read McConnell when we can read Didion – we can track most of her life from her five novels and ten volumes of non-fiction. She was born in Sacramento in 1934, and was proud to be a fifth-generation Californian.