Naming Possibility

“Naming Possibility”

A Review Of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye To All That”



You can always tell a lot of things from a name, and I think there’s an equally good chance to either be wrong or right. When I first saw the name of the author—Joan Didion—I thought, boring. Probably some overrated non-fictionist who is structured and dry, who wears those granny skirts that go down to her ankles. Seeing as how begrudging (averse seems too strong a word) I was to her name, I surprised even myself by reading the first page, which was a biography of sorts. I immediately got up and fetched a pen from the other room when I read the line “…perfected the technique of gathering disparate fragments to convey the randomness and absence of narrative coherence in contemporary life.” Wow. Disparate fragments. Contemporary. The granny skirt rose a few inches above her knee. Intrigued, I read on. After the first couple paragraphs, I thought okay, I like her. But it’s really nothing I haven’t seen before. Until I got to the part where she was sitting in her 35 degree hotel room in New York trying to get over her fever and suffering through the too-cold air-conditioning because she didn’t how know much to tip to whoever might come. I thought, I really like Joan Didion and boy, was I wrong about her name.

         I’ve always admired literature and films that are able to convey random events and make them seem wholly as part of the story as the climax. I think peppering a piece of non-fiction or any piece of art with these details is very humanizing. Some of Joan Didion’s passes at this (that I particularly love) are of her eating a peach on Lexington and feeling the air from the grate on her legs, and the lights above Rockefeller alternately spelling LIFE and TIME that “pleased her obscurely”. It made me understand the character that she used to be in her writing. She was a Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, definitely. Infinitely evasive, spontaneous in the purest sense and carefree, she made me want to live in New York and charge my meals at Bloomingdale’s just to be able to eat. I think the part that fully convinced me of this was when she said that she never cared if she was had no money because she never thought she was—or would be—poor. She always considered the possibilities of becoming the widow of a celery king of the Harlem market or running the Emotional Appeal Institute. My thinking is, why can’t we all be like that? The world would be so much simpler and the rat race absurd. I found her to be tremendously imaginative and hopeful, ironically, in a place like New York.

         In terms of writing style, she reminded me of one person who seems to be worlds apart from Holly Golightly. Her unending, wafting prose reminded me of Nick Joaquin, who will always be famous for his epical sentence in May Day Eve. Her sentences, like his, seem to be an unconventional form of sketching. She strings seemingly unrelated events together to create a montage which makes the reader feel what she is feeling, see what she is seeing.

         To conclude, I have to say that I deeply enjoyed her writing, and will be spending the rest of the night looking for her works online and considering the possibility of being the next Barefoot Contessa in my Hamptons beach house.