Review by New York Times Review
IN A SPIKY LITTLE ESSAY on the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, Joan Didion writes coded instructions for would-be biographers. "Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant," she quotes O'Keeffe. "It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest." In other words, study the particulars of the paintings, not the particulars of the life. In the next sentence, however, Didion tells the story of her 7-year-old daughter, who, on seeing one of O'Keeffe's sublime "Sky Above Clouds" paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago, runs toward it and whispers: "Who drew it? . . . I need to talk to her." The longing to corroborate one's own feelings with the facts of an artist's life - the assumption "that the glory she saw in the work reflected a glory in its maker" - is a primal one, Didion suggests. But there is a paradox inherent in the encounter with art: Even as it may touch us acutely, it is essentially mysterious. It carries only a trace of its maker, and this is style. "Style is character," Didion declares, throwing down the gauntlet: Find me if you can. Tracy Daugherty, the author of "The Last Love Song," the first full-length biography of Didion, seems both intimidated by and worshipful of his subject, who chose not to cooperate with his project. He begins his book with a disclaimer: "Does a biography of a living person make sense? . . . Is the proper distance for evaluation possible now?" He attempts to reproduce "her mental and emotional rhythms" and to apply to her work her own literary methods "revealing the bedrock beneath layers of myth, gossip, P.R., self-promotion, cultural politics, competing notions of human nature." Such a hedge followed by a lofty mission statement is unpromising, but you want to give Daugherty the benefit of the doubt. You want to know who Didion is, precisely because she hides in plain sight. Didion became known for writing about the world in the first person. Whether her subject is the drifting confusions of the '60s or the incursions of big industry on the California landscape, she herself is the probe. One of the great pleasures of reading her is watching the way she takes her own point of view as a given. But there is a fundamental unreliability at the center of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album," the books that established her reputation: the gap between the natural authority with which she casts judgments and her professed nervous, quarrelsome self. It's a gap that has always been enticing to Didion's readers, and one we'd hope her biographer would plumb. But Didion had issued her warning: There's no "I," only style. She is controlled and controlling; even those gestures of insecurity feel planted, a way to draw readers into her confidence. The challenge for her biographer is to detect fresh clues in her work, clues the writer herself missed that might reveal something of her inner life. Daugherty has scoured the record with a hound dog's zeal. The most interesting material he turns up deals with Didion's childhood - perhaps because this is the phase of her life she has written the least about. We see a quietly impassioned young Didion in the midst of a proud, rather morose fifth-generation California family. As a girl, she was captivated by the story of the Donner party - according to Daugherty, this was the beginning of her fascination with lurid violence as a key to the American temperament. As soon as she could, she went to New York and got a job at Vogue, where a demanding editor made her redraft 50-word captions for glossy pictures of furniture and real estate over and over again - rigorous training for writing commanding sentences. Didion married the writer John Gregory Dunne when she was 29 years old - a marriage that, according to Daugherty, started off as pragmatic but became a true creative partnership. Dunne was bearish, openhearted, ambitious, a perfect foil for Didion's watchful, self-contained temperament. He bolstered her and, it seems, never questioned her desire to be on the move and imprint herself on the culture. Together, they traveled to Hawaii and moved between California and New York, wrote screenplays, became Hollywood fixtures and raised a child, Quintana Roo. We get little insight into the workings of this marriage, however. Daugherty is half reproachful (how enviable their life was!), half maudlin as he anticipates the deaths of Didion's husband and daughter, the subjects of her recent memoirs, "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights." The writing gets particularly soggy when he discusses Quintana, whom he sentimentalizes as both the victim of her parents' self-involvement and preternaturally insightful. In the absence of new information, you hope the book will take flight as a work of penetrating criticism. But as Didion establishes herself in her marriage and career, as her politics shift from primly conservative to warily liberal, Daugherty's methods become clearer. He has carefully culled her autobiographical essays and rearranged all the facts they contain in proper order, giving the book a feeling of slavish stenography. Furthermore, he has allowed himself to fall into the most dangerous trap of all when writing about Didion: He mimics her tone. He repeats key phrases as refrains, he splices together incongruous scenes, he ends sections on downbeat prose couplets, meant to fill us with feelings of doom. Almost inadvertently, Daugherty's depressingly ersatz Didion helps us locate the charge and limitations in her writing: her lack of introspection, her narrowness and aridity. On the other hand, Daugherty's abundance of irrelevant detail draws our attention to Didion's miraculous gift for selection (recall the free pink champagne untouched by an underage pregnant bride in "Marrying Absurd," her essay on Las Vegas weddings in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"). Daugherty clearly admires Didion, and claims her as one of the most forceful and original American writers, but I began to feel hostile toward "The Last Love Song." I think this came from the sense that there is something essentially hostile about the act of trying to write a biography of a writer like Didion. She offers us a very special kind of intimacy: a seat behind her dark glasses as she takes perfect aim at her subjects. And yet she preserves a high regard for information that lies outside the boundaries of her scrutiny. In "The Year of Magical Thinking," she describes discovering that her husband had made changes to a document on his computer the day he died. She desperately wonders what it was - but, she writes, "what it was he added or amended and saved at 1:08 p.m. that afternoon I have no way of knowing." It's such a typical Didion statement, allowing for the weight of mystery and the feelings of helplessness it inspires to sit there on the page, vibrating. Next to her severity with unknowable truths, Daugherty's investigations seem intrusive, even naive. As Daugherty's overheated book sent me racing back to the cool relief of Didion's prose, I was struck by a fundamental and counterintuitive generosity in her work. What Didion preserves of herself is her quick reactivity, her canny collection of images, her scraps of memories - all this translated into the most rigorously clear language. Style is how she makes herself available to us: by allowing us to borrow her extraordinary vision, by communicating it in an American speech that is really a melody - a sturdy and beautiful folk song. She sings to us - songs of warning, songs of political deception, songs of mourning. These are the songs of herself. Why demand something more? SASHA WEISS is a story editor at The New York Times Magazine.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 6, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Joan Didion, a California-born descendant of pioneers, was five when her flinty mother handed her a pad of paper and suggested that she write instead of whine. This triggered a lifetime devotion to writing and reading that, coupled to a penchant for daring investigations, led to her becoming a defining voice in the New Journalism movement and a razor-sharp novelist. Didion whose books include her seismic first essay collection, Slouching toward Bethlehem (1968); the novel, The Last Thing He Wanted (1996); and her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) chose not to participate in Daugherty's research. But that did not prevent this most literary of literary biographers (his previous subjects were Donald Barthelme and Joseph Heller) from gathering phenomenally vivid details pertaining to Didion's family history, army-brat childhood, positions at Mademoiselle and Vogue, most painful love affair, long marriage to John Gregory Dunne, complicated relationship with their adopted daughter, numerous nervy writing escapades, including screenwriting ventures, and stylish fame. In this engrossing biography of exceptional vibrancy, velocity, and perception, Daugherty astutely elucidates Didion's ever-evolving artistic explorations and political critiques as she interrogates the meaning and intelligibility of literature and life. He also portrays this intensely candid, searching writer as endlessly hardworking, brilliantly innovative, and as sensitive as a tuning fork or divining rod, trembling with the intensity of it all, perfect in pitch, stunning in revelation.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Daugherty, author of the Donald Barthelme biography Hiding Man, offers a monumental, novelistic examination of Joan Didion's life and career. The book's impressively detailed attention to place, beginning with Didion's California origins, grounds Didion's development as both a fiction writer and a journalist who served as "our keenest observer of the chaos" of the 1960s and beyond. At times, Daugherty tries too hard to mimic Didion's own famously cool and elliptical style, as in the passages about her time in Hollywood, but he settles into confident, engrossing prose when focusing on Didion's literary achievements, from the prematurely world-weary early novels and the groundbreaking essays that cemented her fame to the "extremely political, icily angry" mature works and the heartbreaking late memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Taking a loyal, often protective tone toward his (physically) "famously frail" subject, Daugherty crafts a complex, intricately shaded portrait of a woman also known for her inner toughness and intellectual rigor. This landmark work renders a nuanced analysis of a literary life, lauds Didion's indelible contributions to American literature and journalism (especially New Journalism), and documents a "style [that] has become the music of our time." 8-page b&w photo insert. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
From the 1960s through the 1980s, Joan Didion, now 80, was the best recorder of America's traumas, arguably better than Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, or any other New Journalist. Daugherty (distinguished professor of English and creative writing, Oregon State Univ.), who has penned biographies of Joseph Heller and Donald Barthelme, may be the ideal writer to chronicle her life and achievement. The one flaw that marred Just One Catch, his biography of Heller, was his excessive dwelling on trivia-but the approach works with Didion, whose critical vision is best captured obliquely, in fractured images that convey a feeling of unease without proof of its causes: the real narrative of the times is hidden behind appearance. Where Heller's genius lay in telling the wildest stories ever, Didion is something else completely, an alienated WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) from the far edge of the United States where fantasies replace honesty and the ugliness of power is conveniently elided. As Daugherty notes, Didion's sensibilities are wholly Californian, describing a land with no discernible past and no future worth saving. Everything is present. VERDICT A strong biography. Who won't want to read this "hot" book?-David Keymer, Modesto, CA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An eloquent work on the life of Joan Didion (b. 1934), fashioning her story as no less than the rupture of the American narrative. Didion's works of fiction, nonfiction, and journalism relentlessly probed the times in which they emerged. In this wonderfully engaging biography, Daugherty (English and Creative Writing/Oregon State Univ.; Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, 2011, etc.) wisely sticks to Didion's near obsession with making sense of an increasingly incoherent narrative during the tumultuous decades of the waning 20th century. Showing the "construction of persona" of the California-raised author, Daugherty examines Didion's exploration of the concept of the Western-moving pioneer, resilient and stoical in the face of any calamity, a trope underscored by her mother's somewhat depressed motto, "what difference does it make?" The author also discusses Didion's journal keeping, which fed her penchant for eavesdropping; her early stylistic training under Berkeley instructor Mark Schorer and his "channeling of [Joseph] Conrad; her "frailty" and devotion to being the outsider; and her maddening "elisions," first honed from reading Hemingway. Didion's early pieces of New Journalism for Voguewhere she spent her early formative years, until the mid 1960sreveal the "helter skelter" process that shaped her work: the contingency and chance, rather than the deliberation that critics assumed. In book reviews, movie-star profiles, and political reporting, she was struggling to find an "effective American voice." Enter Time writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she married after the publication of her first novel, Run, River, in 1963, and with whom she moved back to California to work in the more lucrative industry of TV and film. Daugherty devotes much of the later pages of his biography to their remarkable literary partnership, which ended with his sudden death in 2003an event that inspired her haunting memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2003). A dogged biographer elicits from Didion's life much more than tidy observations of "morality and culture." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
