The Internet loves Joan Didion. By ‘the Internet’ I mean people love Joan Didion; they Instagram perfect sepia images of her as proof of how literary they are, share poignant quotes which are, as Didion always is, at once fragile and robust and they share images of whoever of her many books they are reading because, somehow, they always seem to be relevant despite being of a very specific time and place.
The enduring relevance and allure of Joan Didion is that her and image work have lent themselves so perfectly to the Instagram age. Joan Didion and oversized sunglasses. Name a more iconic duo. I’ll wait. There is a reason that she was chosen as the face of Celine in 2015. However, it’s not just aesthetics and quotability that have elevated Joan Didion to icon status and, despite the fact that it’s certainly clichéd to quote her infamous ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’ line now, her Instagram currency does belie something far more powerful.
Didion is irresistible because despite her online ubiquity she herself has kept a low profile, bar that Celine appearance, in recent years. She has said little and so her work has been allowed to speak for itself, which it does. Loudly and clearly. Perhaps that’s part of what draws digital natives to her in droves, for our generation the opposite will always be true. What we have shared and declared about ourselves proceeds us, wherever we go and whatever we do. We are, to use a Didionism, constantly ‘on nodding terms with the people we used to be’ and for that reason she has proved irresistible because she is at once immediate - having mastered the poetic, revelatory confessional mode of writing – and enigmatic.
With this in mind, it’s no surprise that the new documentary about her has caused such a stir. Available now on Netflix, The Centre Will Not Hold was directed and produced by Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne.
Much of the documentary is as you would expect. It is intimate, aesthetically pleasing and moving in equal parts but one section, in particular, is revealing. It tells you all you need to know about Didion and cuts through the online mythologizing that surrounds her, particularly in the hands of people trying and failing to emulate her style.
Dunne is quizzing his aunt about her generation-defining essay ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ which captured life in a counter-culture corner of California, Haight-Ashbury, during the 1960s and calcified it for us all to read about in visceral detail. Dunne asks Didion about an infamous part of the essay, the ending in which she found a five-year-old girl sitting on the floor of a house high on LSD. She wrote ‘she keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only thing off about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick.’
Asked what it was like, as a journalist, to bear witness to a small child high on drugs while her negligent mother floats elsewhere as a supposed emblem of free love, Didion gives a jarring reply.
‘Well, it was…’ she stops, her frail frame freezing underneath her grey jumper to think. ‘Let me tell you, it was gold. You live for moments like that if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad’. There it is, Joan Didion the journalist. Joan Didion the incisive and necessarily detached observer.
What you come away from The Centre Will Not Hold with is this. Didion was and remains a reporter first and foremost. Even when she was excelling in the confessional mode she was a reporter, reporting on grief and heartbreak in Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking. Don’t be deceived by Didion, she might seem like the grandmother of the first-person industrial complex confessional genre but she has never once told you more than you need to know. This documentary is no exception and therein lies its genius, it has left us all wanting more.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.