“Joan Didion Didn't Offer Us Answers” by Lynn Steger Strong
April 13th, 2022- Chelsea Conaboy, nonfiction writer and longtime MWPA board member who was also part of the Boston Globe staff when they won the Pulitzer Prize, was struck by this remembrance of Joan Didion written for TIME by Maine author Lynn Steger Strong. Chelsea has this to say about why she loved the piece:
“On the same day that social media was full of Joan Didion quotes following her death, Lynn Steger Strong published a remembrance that cut right through the noise and got at why Didion moved us—and why those ubiquitous pull quotes felt so entirely inadequate, or even false. Didion's ‘lacerating power’ was in never striving to be neat or contained. Never aiming to make sense. She was ‘wary of any mythology that might somehow anesthetize one’s ability to touch or feel what might be actual or real,’ Strong wrote. Mythology is so often the outcome of loss. We make sense of a person's life and create a story around their death to make remembering them and living without them easier. Strong's essay felt like Didion, once again, excising the true bit.”
Lynn Steger Strong
From Lynn’s essay:
“She collided all the various contradictions built with other people’s stories—politicians, advertisers, movies—bastardized and broken with too much coarse and hazy language, and she helped us see it all more sharply, with the lacerating power that comes from never trying to make sense.
They called her cool because she abhorred sentiment–A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character, and for the reduction of events to narrative–was wary of any mythology that might somehow anesthetize one’s ability to touch or feel what might be actual or real. This is her main complaint about New York, not the city but the story that obscured it, both in ‘Sentimental Journeys’ and, much earlier, in ‘Goodbye to All That.’”