Goodbye to the Dream: On Joan Didion and the Urge to Write.

It began, as obsessions often do, with a single sentence. A sentence so honed, so flinty and exact, that it seemed less written than unearthed, something weathered by time, its edges sharpened by the wind. I was young—too young, really—to understand what I was reading, but I knew enough to recognize something powerful, something I wanted to be close to. It was Slouching Towards Bethlehem, though it could have been any of them. I read those essays feverishly, gulping them down the way you drink water after a long, hard run.

Didion wrote as if the world were both unbearably fragile and utterly indifferent. She saw things as they were: unvarnished, unflinching, and yet laced with an unmistakable, almost aching beauty. The freeways, the motels, the desert heat shimmering off the pavement. She captured America at its most unsettled, its most disorienting, and she did it with a precision that bordered on surgical. It made me want to write, though I wasn’t sure what that meant yet—only that words could be arranged like that, and that arrangement had a power I hadn’t known was possible.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Didion changed the way I saw the world. Before her, I had assumed writing was about storytelling in the most conventional sense: beginnings, middles, endings. But here was something else, something jagged and elliptical, a method of making sense through observation rather than conclusion. Writing as a way of looking, of seeing clearly.

I began carrying a notebook. This seemed important. I wrote down overheard conversations, stray thoughts, the way a stranger tapped a cigarette against the side of a café table. It was an attempt, however clumsy, to train myself to notice the way Didion noticed, to see the patterns beneath the chaos. She wrote about disorder—social, personal, political—but she did so with a clarity that imposed its own kind of order. I wanted that clarity. I wanted to hold the world still, even if only for a moment.

What I didn’t understand then was how much of writing is about waiting. Didion knew this. She spoke often of the space between observation and articulation, the time it took for experience to settle into something writable. She believed in detachment, in the importance of distance—not just from her subjects but from herself. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wrote, but she was always acutely aware of the dangers of those stories, the ways they could betray us. She distrusted easy narratives. She knew that truth was slippery.

As I got older, I returned to her work with new eyes. The cool remove I had once mistaken for aloofness I now saw as discipline. The economy of her language was not just aesthetic but moral, a refusal to indulge in excess or sentimentality. And yet, beneath the control, there was always something trembling—a grief, a loneliness, an awareness of loss.

I think often about the image of her, young and serious, sitting at her desk with her Corvette parked outside, typing out sentences that would become legend. There is something mythic about it, and yet it was just work, day after day, draft after draft. The notebooks, the waiting, the endless shaping of words into something that might last.

It is easy to romanticize our influences, to cast them as icons rather than people, but what Didion taught me—more than style, more than form—was that writing is an act of attention. That to write is to insist on seeing, even when what you see is painful, even when it complicates the stories you tell yourself. That the world is shifting, unreliable, and that all you can do is try, with whatever tools you have, to catch something of it before it slips away.