What Rough Beast: Joan Didion for Boys

I came to Joan Didion late. As a teenage boy in the 1970s, the titans of so-called New Journalism who grabbed me were Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, and their Beat Generation predecessors like Kerouac and Burroughs — the usual suspects. I’d encountered Didion in excerpts from The White Album and Salvador, but I was a grown-ass man before I began to really read and appreciate her in earnest. My loss.

Those male writers fit the adolescent model that seemed tailor made for guys like me. But Joan Didion’s work was sneakier, subtler, and darker. Yes, darker than Hunter Thompson and William S. Burroughs, even though I’m not aware that she ever pulled a gun on anyone, much less the trigger. As I say, it took me a while to mature enough to appreciate it.

(The 2017 documentary The Center Will Not Hold by her nephew-in-law Griffin Dunne is a good introduction to his aunt, both benefitting and suffering from being an insider account.)

People love Joan Didion the way they love Joni Mitchell, another California icon, transplanted though she is: as an artist with a dazzling and absolute mastery of her craft, whose work feels incredibly personal, as if directed individually at them. Like those male authors, she is an unmistakably American writer; what could be more American than drinking an ice-cold Coca-Cola for breakfast every morning? Her…