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Allison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Allison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Hey, quick programming note. Book lovers, come to the Green Space today. WNYC's Green Space for the Mashup American Book Fair. It features storytelling and discussions with great writers and artists like Jacqueline Woodson and Jeff Chang, and others. Please bring the kids for a special early Hanukkah reading. All Of It starts. There's a pop-up book star. It starts at 4:00 PM, goes until 8:30 PM tonight. Tickets and details can be found at wnyc.org/thegreenspace. That is in the future, but now let's get this hour started with a book about a singular writer. It is called The World According to Joan Didion.

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December is a significant month for admirers of writer, Joan Didion. Her birthday was yesterday and she would've turned 89 years old if she hadn't passed away two years ago on December 23rd. She left behind a distinctive body of work that is considered in a new book titled, The World According to Joan Didion by Professor Evelyn McDonnell. It is not a traditional biography. It's not even really a biography. McDonnell writes that she wanted to "Trace Didion's legacy in the wake of her death and map the narrative of her life by visiting the places she lived and wrote about."

Those places include Sacramento, Berkeley, Hawaii, and of course Manhattan. It's a theme-based work with chapters titled Snake Typewriter, Orchid Stingray and Jogger. The latter about Didion's Bold writing in 1991 that questioned the way police and the press handled the Central Park jogger case. Evelyn McDonnell is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount and the incoming faculty director of Media Arts and a Just Society. She's the author of several books, and if the name sounds familiar, she was in fact a senior editor at The Village Voice, Rest in Peace. Evelyn, welcome back to New York.

Evelyn McDonnell: Thank you, Allison. It's really fun to be back. I loved listening to that last segment, all the reasons to love New York, because I've been remembering them. Been here in town for a few days, and yes, the overheard conversations is the big one for me. Oh my gosh.

Allison Stewart: The best.

Evelyn McDonnell: Yes, you don't get that in LA.

Allison Stewart: Not so much. Listeners, if you would like to join our conversation, we are open to take calls from people for whom Joan Didion meant something, maybe a piece of writing of hers. Maybe you knew Joan or you worked with her. Our phone lines are open if you'd like to join us. Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can reach out via social media. This project actually began when Joan Didion was still alive. What was the original project plan? Then how did it change when she passed?

Evelyn McDonnell: Right. It was an idea that we were batting around a few years ago now. I'm trying to understand why she had this incredible stain power that actually seemed to be growing. That I was seeing with my students, that people were seeing in TikTok and BookTok, on Tumblr. Partly because she's so quotable, so people would post these quotes or the iconic photos. It was hard to know how to handle it when she was still alive. The story's still ongoing. Then when she passed, we said, "Okay, now it's a narrative arc. We can try to really understand it."

Then there was such, again, growing interest in her work after she died. So many tributes from magazine covers to Olivia Rodrigo songs. Which of course happened after the book was out. It became doable or understandable after she passed, unfortunately.

Allison Stewart: What was your entry point to Joan Didion?

Evelyn McDonnell: It was in college.

Allison Stewart: Where we know each other from?

Evelyn McDonnell: At Brown University. It was a journalism class, and we read Joan Didion. She was one of two women in the new journalism anthology of Tom Wolfe, which was our textbook essentially for the class. We read her classics story about a murder in the Inland Empire, but it was not a classic crime story by any means. I was blown, blown away by that. Funnily, the teacher of that class emailed me last week.

Allison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Evelyn McDonnell: I know. She saw the book in a bookstore.

Allison Stewart: Wild. What in your view has changed the most about her? 30 years down the road, now that you teach her, now that you teach journalism, now that you've been a professional writer as opposed to Evelyn sitting in college and just being blown away.

Evelyn McDonnell: Right. Of course, Joan was much older than us. Those were already classic pieces by the time I was reading them. I think one of the things that I really discovered in researching and writing this book was that narrative arc and the transformational journey that she made in her own writing from that new journalism, that literary journalism, those pieces about being in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in lieu of filing a divorce or of hanging out in Ashbury slouching towards Bethlehem, and finding the toddlers on acid. That very observational and sometimes very personal kind of writing style.

Also, from her more conservative political upbringing in Sacramento. Goldwater Republican family of conservatives, fifth-generation, California. Daughter of pioneers, AKA colonizers. Fifth gener. How she did become that writer living on the Upper East Side, writing for the New York Review of books about the Central Park jogger case and being one of the first mainstream journalists to really say, this is a terrible injustice that is happening to these young people, and it's endemic of everything that's wrong with class and race in New York City, in America, in the media.

Understanding how she had some reckonings in her own life and how she transformed, and how her writing transformed. Then it actually went back to the more personal style after the deaths of her husband and daughter.

Allison Stewart: My guess, Edel McDonnell, the name of the book is The World According to Joan Didion. Where did you start? How did you start?

Evelyn McDonnell: By just reading. Reading and rereading, and reading everything that I could find. Obviously, all the published works but also going into digital archives and finding the Saturday Evening Post stories that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote in the 1960s that haven't been anthologized. Like a piece she wrote about why she hates cops. Things that people maybe didn't know about her. As well as traveling.

Berkeley and Sacramento were the first places I went to. Where she was born, where she was raised, and where she went to college. Also, where there was a lot of archival materials. Her early work, her early papers, manuscripts, notebooks are at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley. Going through those, reading her notes, reading her editor's notes to her, reading John's notes to her, the revisions of the manuscripts. That was very early and very transformational. Also, just awesome.

Allison Stewart: Well, you got to see that she hand-wrote a lot of her notes before she ever typed them up. What is something you noticed about her handwriting that was interesting, or the way she took notes?

Evelyn McDonnell: Right. Some of it is just so classic to me as a writer. I'm that generation two, I guess, where you type it, and she was typing them out at this point, and then handwriting, and then retyping. Just watching that process that feels so classic and was reassuring to see. Her handwriting is not always very legible. That was a challenge, as it often is.

Also, one of the things I really loved to find were letters and notes back and forth. Some of which were very kind and thoughtful, and showed a personal side of her that she didn't always reveal in public. Then also the fights she would have with editors, and particularly again, over the Central Park, the sentimental journeys story.

Allison Stewart: Yes. We'll get to that.

Evelyn McDonnell: She and Robert Silver went back and forth, back and forth, on lots of that.

Allison Stewart: When you were looking through all of her papers, when you were sitting and reading her notes, what were you looking for? Were there certain questions you wanted answered?

Evelyn McDonnell: I wanted a sense of how much revision she did. Her writing is so nigh on to perfect.

Allison Stewart: So crisp.

Evelyn McDonnell: Every word is so thoughtfully chosen. That's hard in journalism. Even though she was writing long magazine pieces, there were still deadlines. I wanted to see, did that first fully formed from her head? It did not. She really did go through and just refine, refine, refine, cross out, change a word, move things around. There was a lot of editing. One of the things that I think is really compelling about her and my writers like her because she modeled a kind of writing life. She just was so dedicated to being a writer.

Of course, she was kind of a star, too. An icon, but it was ultimately about the writing and seeing that it's a job and it's work, and you keep doing it.

Alison Stewart: Got a text here, it says, "As a lifelong reader and writer myself, I admit I was never a Didion head until I was older and read her books about grief. Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking are necessary for anyone who's experienced loss. I also highly recommend the doc about her, "The Center Will Not Hold." That Cindy texting in from the West Village.

Evelyn McDonnell: Yes. Griffin Dunne's documentary was really important, so well-timed. Her nephew through her husband. I should also say that I did interview three dozen people for the book, including Griffin. Griffin was a fantastic help to me in understanding things about her and John, and great color also.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned in the book early on that she's a writer who frequently wrote about writing. What seemed to interest her about writing?

Evelyn McDonnell: I think she understood the world. That's what she said, and why I write. "I write in order to understand what I think," which when I read that, I was like, yes. [laughs] Exactly, right. She really wanted to understand that for herself. That was her thought process. Was putting it down on paper. I also think that she really wanted to make it transparent to others. There's a sentiment about her that maybe she was elite because she certainly was famous and well off, and lived a very privileged life, and did sometimes write from a place of high society.

I think that she really wanted to pass on her wisdom to people. She did a lot of speeches at universities. Again, talking about writing, she mentored writers. I think she started writing in a notebook when she was five. She was a voracious reader. That was the world as she knew it. She also loved photography and arts, and she also wrote movies and novels, and wrote about The Doors and Joan Baez, but literature was her tablet.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the book; The World According to Joan Didion. My guest is Evelyn McDonnell. I'm going to ask you to read a little bit. I'll do the call-out while you get your book ready. Joan Didion admirers, this is for you. You can call and let us know what about her work, what meeting it had in your life, or maybe you knew Joan Didion or worked with her or around in her orbit. Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. You can call it and join us on air or text us at that number. Social media is available as well at allofitwnyc. Okay. What are you going to read for us?

Evelyn McDonnell: Okay. I'm going to read from the first chapter, which is called Gold, which of course, the Golden Land, the Golden State. Was she from California? Named because people settled it because of gold, but also for the sunset. This says some of the things that we've talked about, about her transformation and her influence.

We live in an age of reckonings over who gets to tell stories and how and why. Didion faced this abyss as a young woman, beginning her career and her family, and her transparency about this dissolution was her and our saving grace. "I've had to struggle all my life against my own apprehensions, my own false ideas, my own distorted perceptions." She said in a commencement address at the University of California Riverside in 1975.

"I've had to work very hard, make myself unhappy, give up ideas that made me comfortable trying to apprehend social reality. I've spent my entire adult life, it seems to me, in a state of profound culture shock. I wish I were unique in this, but I'm not." Didion expressed many of her foundational concepts first in speeches like these, mostly at universities to younger audiences. This is part of what has made her legacy so transformative for multiple generations. She was literally speaking to us, passing on what she had learned.

"It takes an act of will to live in the world, which is what I'm talking about today." She said at Riverside, "By living in the world, I'm really trying to see it, look at it, trying to make connections. That's not easy. It takes work. You have to keep stripping yourself down, examining everything you see, getting rid of whatever is blinding you." Then she offered this advice. "Throw yourself into the convulsion of the world."

Alison Stewart: That's from the book The World According to Joan Didion. My guest is Evelyn McDonnell. As you mentioned there and later in the book, she was a keen observer. What's an example of something that she observed that you think is unique and she used uniquely in her writing?

Evelyn McDonnell: One thing she wrote a lot about smells. Which I think is something that writers sometimes forget to do, especially nowadays. We live in such visual or audio world. She could name the precise perfume that someone who's wearing in a cab in El Salvador in the middle of a war zone. Those kind of, they called them status details. Tom called them that and the new journalism anthology that just tell a little piece of information that in its precision, conveys worlds.

Famously in slouching towards Bethlehem, the essay, being in at the co-ops and communes of Haight-Ashbury, being a fly on the wall watching the interactions between the men and the women, the women and the children, the men and the children. I think having a women's perspective on that, that maybe some of the men that were primarily chronically in that scene didn't have from noting the language that men used about women. Then, also the discovery of young children being given LSD and some terribly misguided effort of enlightenment.

Yes, she said that she could just be the fly on the wall because she was small and she was quiet, and then people would say the things that they wouldn't say if she was asking a direct question.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book, The World According to Joan Didion. My guest is Evelyn McDonnell. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Evelyn McDonnell. Her book is called The World According to Joan Didion. Evelyn's in town for an event at the Algonquin tomorrow night; Remembering Joan Didion. It is sold out, but it could be a wait list with--

Evelyn McDonnell: You can check the Eventbrite and people might cancel it. It's free and people also will probably not show up, but it--

Alison Stewart: Happens.

Evelyn McDonnell: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Occasionally. As I mentioned, the book is not a traditional biography, but obviously, there's some facts that are woven in and that you felt were important to include. What are some of the biographical information that you felt was really necessary in order for people to understand more about her writing and what of herself she brought to her writing?

Evelyn McDonnell: Right. One of the things that I wanted to do was really place her in Sacramento and from California, because I thought that was her base. She always said that that shaped everything there was about her now. She famously moved to New York, worked in the magazine industry, and then moved back to California, and then moved back here again. I do follow broadly the chronology of her life. Obviously, talking about her family is really important. Both her parents, relationship to her parents, particularly her mother was a huge influence on her.

I also think a big part of why Joan didn't say certain things about her relationship to her upbringing and her identity until her mother passed. It's really the book, remember where I was from after her mother died, that she really talks about her California upbringing, but then of course also her relationship to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and then her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. She wrote about those powerfully and beautifully, the great tragedies of her life.

Then I also really wanted to acknowledge that she lived for two decades after those tragic events and had a third act as a woman alone in New York. Not alone, with friends, with some family, but on her own, and had her greatest success as a postmenopausal single woman in New York City, which is very [laughs] I think exciting for some of us [laughs] to think about.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Tracy, calling in from Staten Island. Hi, Tracy. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Tracy: Hi. I just have a silly anecdote. It was December of 2001, and my family and I were having a fancy for us dinner at Baltazar, and we were crammed into this table. The booth behind us was John Dunne and Joan Didion. They were the tiniest sweetest people in these enormous, enormous booths. It was very clear that they were the A-listers, and we were the D-listers at Baltazar that night. We were completely utterly starstruck. That's all.

Alison Stewart: Tracy, what a good story. That's my segue into Joan Didion and John Dunne. What made them an effective professional couple, because they did write together.

Evelyn McDonnell: Yes, absolutely. That scene of them in a restaurant that's so classic. They loved to eat out, they loved to be seen, and see and be seen, and Baltazar was one of their spots for sure. Their collaboration is pretty amazing because that doesn't happen very often between writers, frankly. It's such a difficult profession to succeed in and competition between a partnership is really tough, but they made it work. They read each other's manuscripts and edited each other. They wrote screenplays together. They did a lot of doctoring of other people's screenplays.

Griffin Dunne told me this great story that they would drive around. She famously wrote about driving around Los Angeles because that's what you do, and that they would drive around and write dialogue. As they were driving, she would take notes. Kudos to John Gregory Dunne because obviously she did outshine him overall. He seemed to glory in her refracted fame. He also was extremely successful in True Confessions and other books, but not every man could put up with that.

Alison Stewart: I wanted to ask about the chapter called The Jogger because really some of these chapters take us through different places. There's one about Hawaii called Hotel. There's one about stingray, about love of cars. Jogger, obviously for people in New York is a particular interest that comes through the end of the book. She was already an established writer and reporter at this time. What did Robert Silvers, the New York Review of Books, want her to write about this case, this trial of Black and Brown boys accused of raping this woman in Central Park?

Evelyn McDonnell: Well, this was a case that had been tried in the media even before it was tried in the courts. I think both John and Bob wanted her to write about it. She was not dragged kicking and screaming into that. I think she really wanted to do it. She had pretty recently moved back to New York. It's interesting because she basically comes back to New York from LA and writes a pretty damning piece about her new return. She saw it as a typical of social injustice in America. Before maybe that was the big catchphrase than it is now but that is essentially and--

Alison Stewart: Think about the year, '91.

Evelyn McDonnell: I know.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting.

Evelyn McDonnell: I quote there's a Harvard Nieman lab piece about how this was a very transformative piece of writing for crime reporting to not just take what the police are saying, what the courts are saying, but to really look at the sociology behind a case. She said, "We've named these underage, young people of color, we've named them, and we won't name the victim who is privileged and White." Of course, she's a victim and there's a whole reason for that but she said, this was just one of the examples. She really dove into the difference between how rapes are covered for people of color in different parts of the city.

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:23:55] very simply she said, at one point, "There were early on certain aspects of this case that seemed not well handled by the police and prosecutors, and others, that seem not well handled by the press." She was very clear about it. How was this piece received?

Evelyn McDonnell: Well, not particularly well. Actually, mostly silence. It did not have a huge effect. It took years for the youth to be exonerated, for someone else to confess to the killings, for documentaries and TV series to be made. All of that, she laid out at the time as it happened. I think in retrospect, and within the Black community, Black media, I think she's a hero for having done that and was at the time, but she didn't change the world of White media and of the port courts.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about The World According to Joan Didion. My guest is Evelyn McDonell. The New York public library announced earlier this year the acquisition of the archives of Joan Didion, and John Gregory Dunne, and between them there was I think 30 books of fiction, non-fiction essays. There's just so much. If someone had time and had the inkling to go to the library, and start reading, where would you suggest they go? Where would you suggest they start? Maybe somebody's feeling inspired from this conversation?

Evelyn McDonnell: Well, it's not public, yet. They're still archiving it. I don't know what's all there yet. I've heard some things from her menus to letters.

Alison Stewart: What would you like to be able to get access to?

Evelyn McDonnell: If there were journals and notebooks, which I understand there are some. I think getting that. There are things that she did not talk about and I had trouble confirming in my research, so I did not use. I would search for those. I can't say them because I can't verify them yet.

Alison Stewart: Maybe you will when the archives become available.

Evelyn McDonnell: Absolutely. I'll be there.

Alison Stewart: Of course, what comes to mind when we talk about Didion and Dunne is his death and the death of their daughter, and the work The Year of Magical Thinking. How did you know you wanted to handle these events, given the structure of the book and the kind of book you were writing?

Evelyn McDonnell: Of course, particularly the death of her daughter, her husband did have heart trouble, and they had a long, beautiful life together. Obviously, it was a tremendous tragedy but my grandmother said to me that losing a child was the worst thing that ever happened to her. I can't even really imagine it. She was our age. I feel like I was at parties with her. I don't remember meeting her. I felt very empathetic. It's truly a tragic story.

I think there's aspects of that that I was also not able to fully understand and reveal and that maybe there will be more information about that. I did talk to family members and people that knew them. John was so pretty self-lacerating about both of these deaths. I tried to write with compassion and empathy. People would ask me, "Was she a good mother?" I don't know how you answer-- Nobody asked, "Was John a good father?" was my usual answer.

Alison Stewart: What is a Joan Didion anecdote that you'd like to leave our listeners with? Something that you just really think gets to the essence of who she was and who she was as a writer.

Evelyn McDonnell: There's so many, but I guess I do have this image of Joan later in life after the deaths, sitting in a diner on the Upper East Side, eating her soft eggs, a waiter at the light diner, the three guys diner that she used to go. She went there with John and then she went there alone. Reading the New York Times and drinking her coffee, and being a woman alone. Andrew Bird wrote a song called Lone Didion. Basically, he also was told this anecdote. I don't know, there's something about that moment that's just really compelling to me.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The World According to Joan Didion. My guest has been Evelyn McDonell. Thank you for coming to the studio and have a great event tomorrow night.

Evelyn McDonnell: Thank you, Alison.

 

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