Didion and notebooks
A heat wave is manifesting over Boston for the next four days. Having never experienced one of them is hard to know what to expect. I am staying in and blasting the AC. Being slow to process most things, Joan Didion’s passing was no different. A sudden craving to revisit her ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ essay overcame and took over my morning. That text, a nonfiction piece written in 1966 and published in 1968 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux under the Slouching Towards Bethlehem Essay collection, was one of my first encounters with her writing.
Honestly, after seeing the Netflix documentary on her life I had to explore the prose. Why was I never introduced to her writing before? It felt unfair to discover her in my late twenties. Yet, there we were. Marinating and finding meaning in the simplicity of notebook entries. All of my life I kept little scramblings anywhere I could. To remind me of funny things, interesting things, cool things, silly things, and captivating things. Things as a euphemism for moments and fragments of life note-taking worthy.
Yes, a diary is how note-taking starts in most girls who have one; which is definitely not most girls these days. Only now, at the end of my twenties can I rejoice in the sublime practice of devoting time in the day for record-keeping, accounting for one’s activities as note-taking worthy. I became particularly obsessed with the ill-advised misogynistic dismissal of such a rigorous practice. As if all young girls’ minds could account for where the sentiments and heartaches of adolescence and as if the sentimentality-driven writing wasn’t note-taking worthy. Entire novels have been written under such parameters!
Didion’s essay was the first to validate my in the shadows writing. That is a lie. It was my father’s gift: a green fine ink pen with a green turtle. You are a writer. Now, write. — he said as the biggest of my smiles procured him a big hug. Didion’s essay was the first to bring those kinds of reflections to the forefront. Those about the richness in the intimacy with oneself and past versions.
“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” (Didion, 133)
The curatorial magic imbued in her words afforded my will to continue writing in notebooks with a new impulse. To be a rearranger of things sounded like a glittery title to flaunt as a colorful wardrobe. Visionaries, future tellers, and archivists of memories were those children afflicted with the presentiment of loss. As if it depended on us, weirdos, to fantasize with the idea we can make stay all that happened by writing it down. Jotting into preservation.
‘On Keeping a Notebook’ is not her greatest writing on grief, that is undeniable. Many of her memoirs on the loss of loved ones make a better example. However, I guess what I was looking for as part of my grieving process of her passing was that sense of connection. A gift she forever left us.
“How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook an there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there” (Didion, 135)
“ We are talking here about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.” (136)
Feeling at the forefront here was just as much an investigative tool as any other. Not just the abstraction of feeling and its diagnoses, but the virtue of having them to oneself. Not in a self-serving motion to nurture the ego and grand-self mythology, but intimacy as a terrain prevalent in its capacity to help us analyze, create, and critique.
Preserving everything observed as a fictional grand master’s move to never forget the world, peoples, memories, cities, journeys that were once presented to us, that were once us. The living that we were able to see in those times, the dead, the kinds of detail we paid attention to. And how all of such says more about ourselves than others. Those weaving threads that make/made sense only to us, a perspective.
Here I am, hoping my notebooks will lead me too on the intrepid journey into past selves. Her green pen with a little turtle. She is writing.
