In “Facing the Facts: The Personal Essays of Joan Didion,” Stephanie Redekop situates Didion’s personal essays amid the 1960s “turn to the personal”—that is the sudden visibility of and authority granted to identity and experience. Personality, Redekop argues, became a literary strategy that Didion embraced to resist the abstractions she perceived in fact-based public discourse. Distrustful of the confessional impulse, however, Didion represented her personal perspective and experience as a matter of public fact rather than private feeling. In “Facing the Facts,” Redekop shows how Didion’s persona as frail, vulnerable, and small enabled this emphasis on factual particulars, allowing her to suggest that her attention to fact is uncompromised by ideology. For Didion, facts and particulars are required to ensure that “morality” does not simply become a matter of empty rhetoric, Redekop argues. At the same time, the way that Didion frames facts and particulars is decidedly personal. That is, despite her suspicion of private idealism—including her controversial critique of the “inductive leap from the personal to the political” associated with second-wave feminism—personality becomes an essential strategy by which Didion articulates her moral vision of fact.
“In Joan Didion’s Bodies,” Douglas Dowland observes that, in her essays and memoirs, Didion’s narratorial eye flits both toward and away from the body. On the one hand, as Kathleen M. Vandenberg has noted, Didion’s strategy of “omission and implication” turns the bodies Didion describes into rich sites of figuration; yet, on the other hand, the way in which they do so is through negation and manipulation. The effect, as Dowland explores through the essay “In Bed” and the two memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, is that Didion’s flitting gaze turns such anxious observation of the body into a matter of tactic and style. The body’s depiction as ultimately ambivalent is how Didion transcends—to paraphrase the title of Vandenberg’s book Joan Didion: Substance and Style—substance into style. The result is that the body remains close and anxious, and its author seems all the more distant and inscrutable. Dowland argues that we need not take this as cynically as Didion did, writing in the introduction to Slouching Towards Bethlehem that “writers are always selling somebody out.” Instead, Didion’s bodies show us that writing, particularly in the essay and memoir, is always writing “some body out”: putting the body on the display even if only as a site of negotiation, complication, or erasure.
Finally, in “The Last Thing He Wanted and Joan Didion’s Late Style,” Karen Steigman reads Didion’s fifth and final novel as a stylistic pretext for her subsequent and final memoirs. Didion’s (re)turn to memoir after Last Thing, Steigman argues, is an instance of what Edward Said calls “late style.” Said defines late style as emerging at the end of a writer’s life, where works are marked by a “perplexed and unsettled” style, rather than by quietude or resolution or closure. Bringing Said’s account of late style’s “deliberately unproductive productiveness” to interpreting Didion’s final writing stage, Steigman suggests that Last Thing’s experimental form, where Didion’s characteristic irony, reticence, and parataxis is at its height, is both the apex of her difficult fictional persona and a signpost for the perplexing, unsettled persona and style of her final memoirs. The elliptical and ambiguous metafiction of Last Thing, her most critically underrated work, is thus a useful readerly guide to the formal fragmentation of her memoirs and their considerations of romance, parenthood, and grief against the limits of narrative’s fictional and nonfictional possibilities.