On December 7, a capacity crowd gathered in a long narrow room adjacent to the bar in the Algonquin Hotel, a Manhattan landmark known for sheltering actors, journalists, and other wits during the interwar years, as well as cabaret singers for decades after. At a podium in the middle of the room stood writer Evelyn McDonnell, whose latest book, The World According to Joan Didion, we were celebrating. Assembled in rows were friends of Didion’s, a few in wheelchairs, and friends of McDonnell’s, some of us former staffers at the Village Voice, plus an eager crowd of enthusiasts.
Multiple guests were invited to read not just sections from the new book but also from the original publications that catapulted Didion to fame, soon after she began publishing, more than 60 years ago. Taking turns were downtown performance artist Tammy Faye Starlite, award-winning investigative journalist Cara Buckley, activist professor Shana L. Redmond, and journalist and author Peter Noel, past and present Voice reporter, who read sections of Didion’s prescient New York Review of Books piece on the Central Park Five, who were wrongly convicted of raping a jogger and exonerated in 2002, after years in prison. (One of them, Yusef Salaam, is now a member of New York’s city council.)
McDonnell, a former Voice music writer and editor now teaching journalism at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, is an acknowledged Didion fangirl, one native Californian writing to honor another, crafting a love letter with many autobiographical asides. Like Didion, McDonnell has shuttled back and forth across the North American continent, attending to trends in popular culture on both coasts. Twenty-odd years ago she wrote a biography of Björk; she and Ann Powers, another Voice alum, edited the anthology Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap. Also in McDonnell’s catalog is the 2007 Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.
A wife, mother, and writer, like her subject, McDonnell finds many reasons to make common cause with Didion, and the book toggles happily between the life experiences of the late legend and those of McDonnell, a generation younger.
After spending hours with her new book, I did come away feeling that its title is a something of a misnomer — it could be Joan Didion According to Evelyn McDonnell, with Digressions about Evelyn McDonnell. It’s a fascinating collection of observations coalescing around particular images — literal images, drawn by Anne Muntges, which adorn each of its 14 chapters and the endpapers. These chapters, each titled with a noun, explore themes in Didion’s life and work: “Notebook” (her mother gave her one when she was 5); “Man” (she had a couple of serious boyfriends before marrying John Gregory Dunne, to whom she cleaved “until death did them part”); “Orchid” (she loved the exotic flowers). In a section titled “Stingray,” after the Corvette Didion drove on L.A.’s freeways and inhabits in the iconic Julian Wasser photo on the cover of McDonnell’s book, McDonnell discusses “the marriage of woman and machine,” and catalogs some of the Hollywood gossip that Didion and Dunne assiduously attended to. Didion was, says the young author, “a thinking woman’s fashion icon” who “liked nice things.” This chapter reveals, in devastating detail, the absurdly high prices gleaned for Didion-Dunne’s household goods at an auction in late 2022, “relics” of “Saint Joan” according to a cousin. Thirteen blank notebooks fetched $11,000.
McDonnell’s prose offers the sort of aperçus you’d share with a roomful of eager students: “This is the nature of literary journalism: the merging of deep information with belletrist form,” she tells us. Her style is heavy on melodrama, too often casual where it needs to be — where Didion herself would have been — crisp. Concluding a chapter titled “Snake,” after quoting an interview Didion did following her great losses of 20 years ago, McDonnell observes, “The teenager who was afraid to leave her car grew into the woman who lined up her sights on pundits, politicians, and police. She stared death in the face, turned tragedy into a national book award. Didion mastered the power of observation and the power of grammar. Who needs shotguns?”
A wife, mother, and writer, like her subject, McDonnell finds many reasons to make common cause with Didion, and the book toggles happily between the life experiences of the late legend and those of McDonnell, a generation younger. Also like Didion, the busy McDonnell enjoys hotels (that’s another chapter title), and on her own dime made a trip to Honolulu’s Royal Hawaiian Hotel — where her subject once traveled “in lieu of filing for a divorce”— to soak up detail. She tells us all about her own swimming history, which includes beaches “in New Zealand, Tahiti, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Spain, France, the Bahamas, Montauk, Newport, Michigan, Miami, and of course California. The beach at Waikiki is a wafer-thin ribbon compared to Santa Monica or Miami Beach.”
McDonnell goes on: “It is so much easier to be happy when you are in a beautiful place. It would be even easier if I were wealthy enough not to worry about sticker shock.” Is all of this necessary? Does it illuminate the world according to Joan Didion? I don’t think so, but it pads out McDonnell’s handsome, eggshell-toned pages, and makes us appreciate all the more Didion’s succinct storytelling.
Didion, who died at 87 in 2021, was one of very few women writers participating in the “new journalism” revolution, which began in the 1960s and included such headline-grabbers as Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. She registered, in exquisite detail, everything going on around her in the places to which her curiosity (or journalistic assignments) took her, and the way all of it made her feel.
McDonnell’s assemblage of detail and incident is thought-provoking and often entertaining, but someone new to Didion might do better to pick up the fat collection of her nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, issued by Knopf in 2006. And then, of course, find her five novels, her screenplays, and the award-winning story of her late-life bereavement, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she attempts to process the sudden death of her husband of 40 years. Made into a hit play which toured the English-speaking world, that work was followed by Blue Nights, which dealt similarly with the illness and death of her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo. There’s also a 2017 Netflix movie, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, which shows the tiny, fragile writer in her late years as well as in fuzzy clips from early interviews, lovingly assembled by her nephew Griffin Dunne. Spend 90 minutes with that one and you realize that though her ancestors arrived in California in time for the mid-19th-century Gold Rush, fragments of an Arkansas accent still lingered in her speech. Actually, McDonnell’s book, which closes with a good list of all these sources and more, could serve as the syllabus for a semester-long immersion in Didion’s oeuvre.
I am also something of a Didion fangirl. I interviewed the writer in her Manhattan apartment in 2008 for an Australian magazine, and I’d followed her work since my own early excursions to what McDonnell calls “the Best Coast,” in the mid-1960s; I consider her a guide and an inspiration. I congratulate McDonnell for crediting, at some length, the editors who solicited, supported, and helped to shape Didion’s work.
Didion died in her apartment after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. Kudos to McDonnell for reminding us of her immense contribution to American letters, much of which arrived over decades by way of a now seriously endangered species, the print magazine. ❖
Elizabeth Zimmer has written about dance, theater, and books for the Village Voice and other publications since 1983. She runs writing workshops for students and professionals across the country, has studied many forms of dance, and has taught in the Hollins University MFA dance program.