Slouching towards Didion: “Writers are always selling someone out"

Slouching towards Didion: the book blurb bywords holding the industry back | Books | The Guardian

Slouching towards Didion: the book blurb bywords holding the industry back

Didion-esque, Didion-like, Didion-ish: the shorthand for anything insightful written by a white, female author is turning Joan Didion’s perspective into a prescription and stifling literature’s diversity

Rafia Zakaria
@rafiazakariaMon 3 Jul 2017 22.52 AEST

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“Writers are always selling someone out,” wrote the young Joan Didion in the preface of her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

This is the phrase, as the New Yorker once put it, that “everyone knows her by”. It is also a founding principle of the matrilineal branch of the “new journalism”, which, among its edicts of faith, were just the sorts of things that Didion modelled in that 1968 book of essays: an “immersion” in the lives of her subjects, a preference for “truth” over facts, and a diffident sidelining of the objectivity that defined the “old journalism”.


In the near half-century since, Joan Didion has grown old. She has remained cool, and it is perhaps this enduring quality that has transformed “Didion” into a word beyond just a proper noun. With the coy assistance of suffixes, her surname has become an adjective, with “Didion-like” and “Didion-esque” signifying all things Didion: a detached but insightful, prescient but vulnerable female writer, acidly exposing American faults to American readers.


That’s what I would have thought it meant. Instead, a closer look at the use of Didion-like reveals that it is only applied to certain female writers. Take Emily Witt, author of Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love: deemed “Didion-esque” in a Vogue profile in which Witt admits to loving Didion’s ability “to hold herself in the middle distance”, cannily writing from her own perspective without writing about herself. Witt emulates just that: also heading out to Haight-Ashbury, in San Francisco, as Didion did in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Didion wrote about drugs; Witt chooses sex as her vice and both do it in Haight-Ashbury. The parallels may be loose, but they are enough for Witt to be touted as an heir to the grande dame herself.

Then there is Alana Massey, a writer on “identity, culture, vice and virtue” who also got the label when her essay collection All the Lives I Want was released earlier this year. The final essay is about her obsession with Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays. It comprises perhaps a 10th of the book, but that is enough for journalists and reviewers to start with comparisons.

Didion is not the first author to become an almost-adjective. Every mannered novel invites comparisons with Jane Austen: Anita Brookner was so sick of comparisons to her that this interview, entitled Just Don’t Mention Jane Austen, says it all; Alice Munro has been billed as “a 20th-century Jane Austen”. Truman Capote gave rise to “Capote-esque” (any true-crime or remotely macabre book), while David Foster Wallace is attached to writers besotted with long sentences. All male and Jewish writers are inevitably the next Philip Roth. What happens often is not often what should happen often.


Both Massey and Witt have written books that are entertaining and often funny, as are the books of Jessica Valenti (“In the tradition of writers like Joan Didion”); Claire Vaye-Watkins (in praise, “references to Joan Didion abound”) and Anne Enright (“echoes Joan Didion’s furious, cool grief”). The writers praised as being Didion-esque are all white and all female – and so somehow all Didion. It could all be brushed off as slightly annoying marketing, were it not for the requirements of being Didion-esque: the truth is that it is far harder for a writer to “sell someone out” if they don’t belong to that large white swathe. 

Flirtation with the insider-outsider dichotomy is simply not possible without whiteness; nor is non-white self-exposition possible without the risk and baggage of representing all blackness, all Muslim-ness or all Latino-ness. 

Assumptions, fears and stereotypes exist in the space between the non-white would-be Didion and her subject. The non-white “I” can never situate herself in that “middle ground”, the sexy limbo between subjective and objective that Didion so masterfully inhabited in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

A great deal has been said about the whiteness of publishing (and more recently the white-femaleness of publishing). Everyone seems to want publishing to be diverse and for the literary conversation to reflect the perspectives and ideas of the other and outsider. 

This can’t happen without dismantling the literary models that make impossible demands on those without whiteness and its accrued privileges. The conversion of Joan Didion’s predilections into prescriptions does exactly that: birthing a literary genealogy that only white women writers can claim. Five decades ago, Didion earned her reputation by being avowedly and unabashedly herself. Respecting her today may require giving up the search for more Didion-ish writers, and instead recognising the terrific worth of Didion, the proper noun.