The iconization of a literary persona. Joan Didion, literary celebrity or ultimate “sad girl”? – Marie Chanson

Icon, essayist, novelist, inspiring, glamourous… There are many words to describe Joan Didion but maybe none as accurate or plain as cool. Born in 1934 in Sacramento California, Didion is part of what is now considered the modern canon of American literature. Known primarily for her early work, Didion embodies the essential Californian writer. Her two collections of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) have indeed associated her permanently with the turbulent 1960s. Only later in life did Joan Didion become synonymous with memoirs and writings on grief and death after the publication of The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), the account of her life since the passing of her husband and the illness of her daughter. Despite this impressive literary career of more than fifty years, the image of Didion in the collective imagination has, in fact, remained the one of her youth. The Didion of the1960s has left a surprising number of traces in our contemporary pop culture for a writer so anchored in her time period. This raises the question of the perennity of her work. When a writer is so iconized, what actually remains of the substance of their writings?

 

 

Joan Didion : the pop icon

 Coco Chanel famously said: “Fashion changes but style endures”, and Joan Didion could be proof of that^[1]. In 1968, after the publication of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Julian Wasser, a renown photographer of the time, immortalized her in pictures. Yellow Corvette, huge black sunglasses, cigarette dangling from her thin fingers, mysterious aura and overall detached attitude, that is how many would become familiar with Didion’s image. In 2015 the French luxury brand Céline created an ad campaign inspired by this series of photographs. They also used Joan Didion herself, and Joni Mitchell (an iconic folk singer of the 1960s in Laurel Canyon), as the face of the campaign. In the ad we can see Didion, as an elderly lady still rocking her sunglasses and impersonating this mysterious woman.

 

The Wasser photoshoot still has a massive presence online, on social media especially. Instagram and Tumblr users, for example, illustrate some of Didion’s quotes with these images. And the quotes they choose are a good indication of what remains of Didion in the mind of the younger generations: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, from The White Album or, “Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. They associate these visuals with some of Didion’s most “catchy” quotes, taking them out of context. They also often draw parallels between Didion and other writers such as Sylvia Plath, or Susan Sontag, or even Virginia Woolf, correlating some of their characteristics and grouping them under the same umbrella: “Therapy is nice but finding comfort in relating to eccentric tortured and introspective female writers is a lot faster and cheaper^[2].” Today, in pop culture and on social media, Didion is an icon of the 1960s, an image of the past embodying perfectly the cool, introspective, sad, and detached female writer trope. This description of the author reveals a much larger phenomenon that goes beyond social media only.

 

Director Matt Spicer used his movie Ingrid Goes West (2017) as a platform to illustrate the link the younger generation has with Didion on social media, and how it has changed the way the writer is perceived. It dives in the superficiality of social media and how when one shows something online it impacts the way they are seen directly. For example,  in the movie a famous influencer in Los Angeles shows herself reading Didion, more specifically The White Album, as a consequence making her appear smart, cultured, on brand with what is expected (a girl in L.A. has to read Didion, everybody knows it), and more than anything, cool. The movie showcases well the fetishism that has developed around the figure of Didion throughout the years. Even in more serious or academic papers on Didion’s writings, there is a certain vocabulary used, based on the notions of fetishism and cult. Like a star and not a writer, Didion has fans and not readers, and she could be the leader of the “cult of Saint Joan” as Daphne Merkin puts it^[3]. And if her writings are the backbone of this cult, the foundation is her image indeed. After all, the word icon from the Greek eikon “likeness, image” is based entirely on the idea of visual representation^[4]. In a quite unique fashion Didion’s image, or what is remembered of it, has lent itself perfectly to social media and our modern times.

Joan Didion: the ultimate sad girl

The Internet loves Joan Didion. By ‘the Internet’ I mean people love Joan Didion; they Instagram perfect sepia images of her as proof of how literary they are, share poignant quotes which are, as Didion always is, at once fragile and robust and they share images of whoever of her many books they are reading because, somehow, they always seem to be relevant despite being of a very specific time and place^[5].

As stated previously Didion is not the only figure put under this “introspective but sad” label. There is undeniably a fascination for the figure of the sad or tragic woman, whether she is fictional as Ophelia (Hamlet), or not. Charlotte Brontë, Princess Diana, Sylvia Plath, Marylin Monroe etc. are a short list of common examples. This could even be described as a phenomenon, society’s fetishization of female pain, making angst desirable and cool. When they are writers, if they have written about their pain and difficulties, the label is even more constraining. Because Didion wrote about her sometimes tortured mental state, it has been taken as an aestheticizing of suffering, and the pinnacle of what a writer can be: writing beautifully, even at the worst times, channeling this pain into something aesthetically pleasing, useful, and intelligent. Female icons thus find themselves trapped in some categories, the “sad girl” being one of the most popular. As Leslie Jamison developed when studying the “Cult of the Literary Sad Woman”:

Joan Didion, whose heroines wear affliction like an elegant cocktail dress — as if their pain had been plucked from the runways. […] It’s all there: the tears, the aftertaste of soured glamour, the waif-y anguish and the distinctly female quality of it all. Affliction even subtly shapes the journalistic persona Didion crafts for herself in her canonical essays: a rigorously unsentimental reporter writing about senseless violence and serial killers, picking apart the hollow promises of the American dream, but still facing all this darkness with a beguiling female fragility, plagued by migraines and existential angst, packing her own size 2 black cocktail dresses when she hits the road^[6].

Didion made sadness and frailty fashionable, but her prominence in modern trends such as this one is not the only reason her image is still so present today. When Céline chose Didion and Mitchell, it was calculated. Rare are the icons of the 1960s who have kept a successful career for more than fifty years, and numerous are the women who have been sacrificed to time and forgotten. As Vicky Spratt develops:

Joan Didion and oversized sunglasses. Name a more iconic duo. I’ll wait. There is a reason that she was chosen as the face of Celine in 2015. However, it’s not just aesthetics and quotability that have elevated Joan Didion to icon status and, despite the fact that it’s certainly clichéd to quote her infamous ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’ line now, her Instagram currency does belie something far more powerful^[7].

Joan Didion: the literary godmother

Joan Didion’s relevance today is not entirely due to her image, but also her writing prowess. Her literature, her commentary on American life, society, and politics is still relevant, and a unique contemporary testimony of some of the key decades in recent American history. She is perceived by many millennial white women as an “intellectual godmother”. There is a remanence of her literary work in its context, and a sense of transmission. Didion after all, without being a rebel, especially compared to other 1960s female icons like Janis Joplin, Diana Ross, Joan Baez, Eve Babitz etc., was a pioneer in her own right. Taking from her family heritage of western pioneers, Didion paved the way for many others, showcasing how one can be a writer, a mother, a journalist, with a long, successful career, admired by both critics and public and not even overplay this achievement. But what made Didion successful in her time and what she is today, is the special combination of her literary persona and her writings. Her persona was entirely her creation, she chose what she exposed of herself to the public either in text or images. Because of that she created a sort of “legend” around herself, foreseeing things today that we name “vibe,” “aesthetic,” or even “energy.” Didion’s vibe is hers only. Some of it was true, some aspects probably calculated and cultivated. Her own comparison to a mouse that people don’t notice or even pity was one more disguise to then reveal the astute journalist behind, in her sharp, exact prose. And Didion did linger in her own self-mythologization or self-iconization, in the way she had of framing herself, but she never reduced herself to this image, always relying on her words to deliver her message, using her image and persona as a mean to do so.

But then one can only wonder if at one point the writer becomes prisoner of this image, of their own creation. When does the writer disappear behind the caricature of himself? It could be argued that now, Didion is a stereotype. She symbolizes a certain period in time, but more so a certain lifestyle that is appealing exactly because it is forever gone and thus nostalgic. None of us will ever be a writer and socialite of the 1960s, friends with Janis Joplin, and the Mamas and the Papas, commenting on the decaying state of the country and of the American dream. None of us will ever be Joan Didion, but it does not prevent one from trying to emulate it.

The act of anointing Joan Didion as our favorite, our best, our everything, is the act that reveals what we’re trying to say: that we’re cool, that we’re educated, that if we are not young and white and slender and well-dressed and disaffected and sad and committed to the art of writing as an arduous and soul-sucking process that must be endured yet Instagrammed simultaneously, then we will be, at least, as close as possible to those identifiers even if it kills us^[8].

And because of that, Didion has become a sort of social currency, an image that immediately explains our status on social media. She is not only Joan Didion anymore, she is also her legacy and her image.

Joan Didion is a living stereotype and I only mean that in the most literal definition of the term: Joan Didion functions as a mental shortcut. Joan Didion requires very little explanation to a very large group of people, representing a class of consumers who tend to be young, female, upper middle class, white^[9].

And as Haley Mlotek said in her plea to free Didion from this metaphorical cage, maybe we have lost the main point, which is very simply that Didion was a person who wrote “some things that lots of people think are very good^[10]”. Because of her self-iconization, which made her successful, Didion has now an incomplete heritage, an image that represents a very short period of her career and embodies ideas she herself would have disapproved of.

 

Joan Didion: the writer trapped in her image

Indeed, it is interesting to see also what is not remembered of Didion. All these “fans” forget to mention some of the most complex and interesting facets of the writer, like her criticisms of the feminist movement of the 1960s, or her privileges that skewed her perception of society and life. Overall it is a simpler, more limited version of Didion people tend to gravitate towards today. They appreciate her cool image, some of her cool essays (who does not want to read about the rich and glamourous of the 1960s?) but forget a large part of her legacy. It emphasizes even more the idea that at one point the writer becomes prisoner of his success. And a large part of Didion’s success is her extraordinary ability to be in tune with her time. In The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem Didion distances herself from everything happening in her world, she tries to explain these events but finds no explanation. She is confronted to political assassinations, countercultures, drug abuse, and yet she remains at a certain distance. In other words: “part of the mystique of Didion is precisely her ironical and clear-eyed detachment from the social upheavals of her times^[11].” But this stance allowed her to grow as a writer and a journalist, becoming more involved as her career veered towards more political subjects, before coming back to the ultra-personal with The Year of Magical Thinking.

Didion may be a white girl to whom generations of white girls have been disproportionately drawn, but she’s one we—and all kinds of readers—have desperately needed. In the prefeminist 1950s and ’60s, we needed her to show that it was possible for a woman to put her writing first without apology or fanfare. In the let-it-all-hang-out ’70s, we needed her to be the disciplined storyteller who could deliver the goods while keeping herself at arm’s length. In the ’80s and ’90s, we needed her to separate the nation’s ghosts from the political machine. More recently, we needed her to grow old before us and, even amid unthinkable personal tragedy, show that it’s possible not only to remain visible and vital but also to remain unimpeachably, ineluctably cool. We still need her. Maybe now more than ever^[12].

This intimate way she writes about herself and her life makes her vulnerable on the page while actually remaining in power and choosing what she shows. Didion is both, of her time and dissecting it, detaching herself from it, making her relevant even generations after. Her style in writing and in her life is timeless and inspirational. She was an icon before the internet and social media came along. In 1991 Joni Mitchell wrote a song called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” a direct reference to Didion’s work, showcasing how she has always resonated with culture. The issue is that today Didion is only an icon.

It is obviously very reductive to consider artists in such light, but Didion is a prime example of how iconization is actually an incomplete fantasy. This aesthetic she represents today, continues the confining narrative of: if an introspective female writer talks about her life and depression, let’s put her to the rank of sad girl icon. It’s overly simplified but true. And it raises numerous criticisms, many only perceiving her as that, an author for sad, middle class white women, who like to think they are tortured. It erases other valid criticisms some may have concerning Didion’s work, such as her perspective on the civil rights movement for example and its relevance when she was a privileged white American woman or her actual portrayal of mental struggles for women in the 1960s. Instead her heritage is soiled by derogatory (and frankly sometimes misogynistic) terms such as “original millennial woman,” “sad girl aesthetic,” and so on. Even her “fans” miss a part of her text and her image focusing on the romanticization of vices and mental illness, the wit and glamour of her prose and not her cutting deeper analysis and questioning of society.

It appears then that Didion’s idolization, her “cult”, is both partly what keeps her literature and heritage alive but also what prevents it to shine fully. It takes away the context of her writings and demonstrates the limits of concepts such as collective memory and nostalgia. The way social media tend to simplify and reduce things is a much larger phenomenon but its impact on the legacy of writers is striking. When does the literary celebrity disappear behind the simplified version of the persona remembered today in pop culture? When did Didion  become the ultimate “sad girl”? Her case exposes well how despite fifty years of a successful career, you can’t be a it-girl and a fully accomplished writer. You’re just a sad girl.

Marie Chanson – Master 2 Etudes Anglophones

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^[1] FISHER, C. “How Coco Chanel Shaped Fashion History,” in Sotheby’s, August 19, 2024, https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/how-coco-chanel-shaped-fashion-history.

^[2] TUMBLR, Midnightcerealblog, https://www.tumblr.com/midnightcerealblog.

^[3] MERKLIN, D. “The Cult of Saint Joan,” in The New York Times, January 20, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/books/review/reckoning-with-joan-didion-the-archpriestess-of-cool.html.

^[4] “ICON,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/icon.

^[5] SPRATT, V. “The Real Reason Millennial Women Should All Be Obsessed With Joan Didion,” in Grazia, October 30, 2017, https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/tv-and-film/can-learn-joan-didion-documentary/.

^[6] JAMISON, L. “Cult of the Literary Sad Woman,” in The New York Times, November 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/books/review/leslie-jamison-sylvia-plath-joan-didion-jean-rhys.html.

^[7] SPRATT, V. “The Real Reason Millennial Women Should All Be Obsessed With Joan Didion,” in Grazia, October 30, 2017, https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/tv-and-film/can-learn-joan-didion-documentary/.

^[8] MLOTEK, H. “Free Joan Didion,” in The Awl, January 13, 2015, https://theawl.eli.pizza/2015/01/free-joan-didion/.

^[9] MLOTEK, H. “Free Joan Didion,” in The Awl, January 13, 2015, https://theawl.eli.pizza/2015/01/free-joan-didion/.

^[10] MLOTEK, H. “Free Joan Didion,” in The Awl, January 13, 2015, https://theawl.eli.pizza/2015/01/free-joan-didion/.

^[11] MCLENNAN, R. M. Joan Didion and the Ethics of Memory,  Bloomsbury. 2022

^[12] DAUM, M. “The Elitist Allure of Joan Didion.” in The Atlantic, September 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-elitist-allure-of-joan-didion/399320/.

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