18 Jan. 2022
Joan Didion’s style was signally detail—oriented, carefully articulated.
She was prolific and respected yet personally insecure even far in her career (Didion 1992, 16):
I thought so little of myself as a writer that summer that I was obscurely ashamed to go to dinner with still another editor, ashamed to sit down and discuss this “work” I was not doing…
Compare St. Catherine of Siena’s dependence on proof to ground her personality (McHale 2021).
Visibly wasted, she justified her thinness by saying “I’ve weighed this since the 70s.”
Anorexics relay autobiographical memories in a notably more abstract way (Bomba et al. 2014; Nandrino et al. 2006).
Her person is indeed abstract:
Clearly I was not the ideal teller of this story, something about my version had been at once too offhand and too elliptical, something in my tone had failed to convey the central fact in the situation (I would encounter the same failure later when I had to tell our daughter, Quintana), …
(Didion 2005)
I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. “He was on his way home from work – happy, successful, healthy – and then, gone,” I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident.
Note Didion quotes a psychiatric nurse on what would be appropriate in such circumstances. She endorses emotions elliptically, at no point are they presented as part of her self.
After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”
The writing is alexithymic; it does not found itself on her own emotions and orients itself by citing what other people describe in a similar situation. (Alexithymia is notable in anorexics (Bydlowski et al. 2005); her writing rarely names emotions directly)
A similar technique is used elsewhere, famously:
“In June of this year, patient experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out. A thorough medical examination elicited no no positive findings and she was placed on Elavil, Mg 20, tid … The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses and increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress… Emotionally, the patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings. Her fantasy life appears to have been completely preempted by primitive, regressive libidinal preoccupations many of which are distorted and bizarre… In a technical sense basic affective controls appear to be intact but it is equally clear that they are insecurely and tenuously maintained for the present by a variety of defense mechanisms including intellectualization, obsessive-compulsive devices, projection, reaction-formation and somatization, all of which now seem inadequate to their task of controlling or containing an underlying psychotic process and therefore in process of failure. The content of the patient’s responses is highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations, and basic reality contact is obviously and seriously impaired at times. In quality and level of sophistication patient’s responses are characteristic of individuals of high average or superior intelligence but she is now functioning intellectually in impaired fashion at barely average level. Patient’s thematic productions on the Thematic Appreciation Test emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure…”
The patient to whom this psychiatric report refers is me. The tests mentioned —the Rohrschach, the Thematic Appreciation Test, the Sentence Completion Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index—were administered privately, in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, in the summer of 1968, shortly after I suffered the “attack of vertigo and nausea” mentioned in the first sentence and shortly before I was named a Los Angeles Times “Woman of the Year.” By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.
Whatever her attitude towards the assessment, it presents the facts, and she only mentions that such emotions are appropriate upon reflection. In her own words:
Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.
(Didion 2021, 49)
She introduces the abstract reason for her psyche before even mentioning behavior:
There certainly is what doctors call a “migraine personality,” and that personality tends to be “inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist.” … my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.
(Didion 1979, 171)