When This Blows Over

JOAN DIDION – EXPLAINED (very well): Though there have been other
essayists who share Didion's disdain for simplistic narrative, she really
does not belong to any tradition of American essayists.
The traditional essayist is a sense-maker and an imposer of order,
and in order to make sense and impose order, traditional essayists
assume an authorial command over their material (which is often their
own lives, and/or their own historical period). But the really good
essayists do not present themselves as authority figures who have
the power to make sense of themselves and/or of the historical period
they are living through. The good ones know that ages do not have
names and that people remain mysterious, even to themselves.
Didion’s temperament is conservative (she wants things to make
sense, to cohere) but never governed by or determined by any ideological
preconceptions of how things should be or how we would like them to be.
Her work presents a challenge to what we know, as well as our ways of
knowing. Therefore, reading Didion is unsettling, discomfiting. Her essays
succeed precisely because she does not try to name the thing that she
writes about with nice clarifying titles or topic sentences, rather she
presents her own competing impressions and competing ideas about the
unnamable something that has her interest.
She is very good at conveying her own singular impressions of
particularly chaotic times, or, more accurately, her own motions of
thought and cognitive insecurities during that moment in time when
no event or person encountered seems to be operating according to
rational or knowable laws. She is in many ways our poet of the
irrational. Instead of presenting her observations in neat linear patterns
that follow a single structuring logos, she presents them as the myriad
fragmented interventions that they are. She leaves the sense-making, the
imposition of order, to others.