Cool is the word used most often to describe her: the Coca-Colas and the cigarettes each morning, the leotard and the typewriter, the scotch and the shawl. California. Writing for the movies to make a living, making notes for the director, the short tight dispatches from the South and West.
But the word cool means the absence of strong feeling, and she was the opposite of that. I have a theatrical temperament, she once said. A wholly penetrable surface—one might also call her—that she then attempted to reshape into language that was capable of penetrating the rest of us.
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There’s nothing one can write about Didion that’s not already been written, that she wouldn’t or did not already write better herself.
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Her impossibly small stature: I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. She sat in wait until the moment, its ruptures and its textures—not the story, but the life that lived beneath it—declared itself somehow. The 5-year-old in white lipstick, high on LSD, in Haight Ashbury in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: The five-year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes Coca-Cola, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach.
It was gold, she told Griffin Dunne, her nephew, in his documentary, The Center Will Not Hold, about her life.
There’s an idea around writing that we do it to make sense, to give shape, but staying free of the assumption that there’s sense to be made was one of Didion’s most astounding accomplishments. Is that 5-year-old O.K.? Should she have taken her home, or called somebody in? What to make of Didion’s…
Source : time
