By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini
When the moon slivers right in silver, and the cloud crowd around, expect to see the silhouette etch its away on the window. The gas hue of the lamp dances around the curtains, flirting with the supersonic glow of the TV. Mugs jingle. A smile creeps out. Rows of books, obscured by trinkets, memories, and the private and confidential. And all of this transmutes from your night-in by the fire side, to the kick inside of the footsteps, that stop momentarily, tying a shoe or checking their phone?, and feed off that light. The eyes that widen and feast whilst hands remain in pockets and lips blister in the chill, take the tableau in delight. You are being watched. Let us feast on your existence.
Inventory taken of your surface existence, let’s turn those eyes up, give them a real wedding breakfast. If those eyes were to take their shoes off by the door, weerily sigh as the keys clatter in the dish, and yawn and stretch towards the kettle, where do you expect them to go? A quick rummage through the notes on the fridge, a glance at the calendar, a poke through the medicine cabinet. But you curated your quarters so well, and wouldn’t you rather they dine on the print you choose to hang just there, or even at the way you placed the fruit in the bowl. How could these eyes be so cutting, so searching for clues in an investigation only Kafka could decipher, rifle through your home, your heart, your legacy of objects. Why, they delight in this seeing the mudnade objectivity of your existence, how perverse! But I gave you things to look at, some entertainment here and there, why must you devour all of me now – slurping the last drops of the tea from the pot like that gruesome teatime tiger expecting to be satiated from the stewed embers. Please, dear eyes, leave. Bolt the door behind you, and please, don’t come back here, just look at the way the window sill changes for you, and be content with that.
5th of February, 2025. My 21st birthday. And what better present, for a girl like me, to receive the news that Joan Didion’s therapy notes could soon belong to me. Isn’t this the news we have all wanted since her death? Finally, a chance to take stock of this brilliant mind, to really understand her. The literary community yelped.
Joan Didion is one of the US’s most defining writers. With needle-like precision she dissected America’s later 20th century. Her unrelenting commitment to journalism has rendered her with a wry, poignant voice, even its novelistic utterances. However, whilst she captured the world around her in her words, preserving the cultural offshoots and fascinations of America for us to gawk and examine like limbs in formaldehyde, Didion never quite captured herself. Her essays and articles harbour an essence, fleeting and distinct; like a stranger’s perfume as they walk past, we know it’s there but what is it, and where did it come from? From the Sharon Tate murders to the LSD shrouded Haight-Ashbury district, we locate a vision of Didion from the cultural landmarks she fashions herself around. This highly curated double-exposure of both author and object has enshrined Didion as the defining figure of a generation and that ‘California belongs to Didion’ without actually revealing the intricacies of being the woman who keenly observed the West Coast zeitgeist .
Did Didion pre-empt the sudden urge we would have to dissect, to own, that voice presented to us, thus her careful consideration of what she wanted us to know. She was a keen follower of Hemmingway, learning to structure sentences to the same acute precion by laboriously studying the very syntax and rhythm of them and synthesising this with her own literary vision. Everything she did was careful, precise, and exactly how she wanted to say it. Therefore, to leave something out in Didion world is not merely forgetfulness, or not being able to work it in, or being embarrassed, but a clear message about what she does and does not want us to see. Noli me tangere, for Didion’s I am. Her two most autobiographical works, My Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, continue to approximate Didion in relation to what is around her. As her world becomes swallowed by the shock of her husband’s sudden death, the continual murmuring anxiety of her daughter’s life and upbringing, the beeping of heart monitors, the gare of x-ray prints, the calendar squares with the sames of different hospitals and departments, we see Didion reconfigure her world on these terms, showing us her life in the truest forms, unsensational and unsympathetic.
The word raw enjoys being thrown around the confessional, personal writing scene. This piece was raw as when I cut into it all that came out were tears, and blood, and guts, and juice. Maybe Didion saw that the rawest piece is the one that submits to be cut into and exposes a fleshy marbling, the blood shocked still in the veins. This craving for the ‘raw’ – the supposed real – voice behind the author has led to the letters and diaries of most of the canon to be available. Reading another’s diary no longer feels like sneaking about into another’s bedroom, searching under the bed, the dresser, the piles of clothes, and cracking the code, but a right we expect to receive; why write and not publish it for us, your peanut crunching crowd. The harrowing entries of the Plath journals show one of the fiercest writers of the 20th century at her most fragile. She speaks of an immeasurable, unrelenting pain, that she attempted to make sense of through her nightly writing campaigns to her ferocious psyche. The readiness we are to access them leaves a sour taste in the mouth, as we realise the perverse voyeurism on display as we are delivered an author’s life on a slab.
I am by no means a literary critic, no less one who believes in the autonomy of the text and the death of the author. Life informs art, afterall. But, when reading Plath’s diaries do I really get a better sense of the pain trapped between her lines? Does knowing that Woolf ate an egg or some beef or a trifle on the same day she began to pen Orlando help us unlock the text? Probably not… The ownership of the diary is a grab to owning the author; we hold their lives in our hands and scrutinise the mundane details they flourish poetically attempting to figure them out. Didion was a mother and wife as well as the writer and icon that emerges in her writings. Her careful curation of self to ensure her other selves only appeared under her watch, her direction, her discretion, was an attempt to assert herself as a public writer with an enchanting capability to fascinate and entertain with her pen, not a public figure whose life fascinates us. The intimacy of Notes to John goes against the constructed self that Didion intended.
Anais Nin, storing her diaries in a bank vault (supposedly). The holy relic of the author’s diary is pestered by prying eyes.