The Daily Stoic - Author Evelyn McDonnell On Joan Didion’s Life and Legacy (Pt 2)

Episode Date: February 10, 2024

On this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan continues his conversation with writer, academic and associate professor of journalism, Evelyn McDonnell. Together they discuss the obstacles and how to get through them, the illusion of stability, how staying calm can be contagious, and her book The World According to Joan Didion.Evelyn McDonnell, professor of journalism in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, has been appointed the inaugural faculty director of Media Arts & A Just Society (MAJS), effective January 2024. The acclaimed journalist, essayist, critic, feminist, native Californian, and university professor who regularly teaches Didion’s work, is attuned to interpret Didion’s vision for readers today. Inspired by Didion’s own words—from her works both published and unpublished—and informed by the people who knew Didion and those whose lives she shaped, The World According to Joan Didion is an illustrated journey through her life, tracing the path she carved from Sacramento, Portuguese Bend, Los Angeles, and Malibu to Manhattan, Miami, and Hawaii. McDonnell reveals the world as it was seen through Didion’s eyes.Signed copies of The World According to Joan Didion are available at The Painted Porch. X: @EvelynMcDonnellIG: @msLadyEvelyn✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Soak Pockets. I don't know if you can hear that squeaking, squeaking there. That is Joan Didion's chair. I'm sitting in Joan Didion's chair, and today's episode was recorded at Joan Didion's table. If you listen to the podcast regularly,

you know that some special, a little special piece of history that the Daily Stokes Studio is built around. Fellow sacramentan, a writing hero of mine, and I think a great lowercase stoic and just an absolutely fascinating woman, Joan Didion, love her books. I've read almost all of them.

We carry a bunch of them in the paint a porch. And so I was really excited when today's guest book came out, The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn MacDonald. And it's a great biography. I think the first great biography of a figure who I'm sure people will be writing and talking about for many, many years and someone that I wanted to have on the podcast. And I think she did a great job. Evelyn is a professor of journalism and essayist,

a critic in native California, who has been teaching Didion's work for many, many years and has a unique perspective on her. And you can check out her awesome new book, The World According to Joan Didion. We've got signed copies of the painted portraits. You can follow her on Twitter, at evalynmcdonald and on Instagram, at missladyevilyn. I remember very specifically,

I rented an Airbnb in Santa Barbara. I was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I just sold my first book and I've been working on it and I just needed a break. I needed to get away and I needed to have some quiet time to write. And that was one of the first Airbnb's I ever started with. And then when the book came out and did well,

I bought my first house. I would rent that house out during South by Southwest and F1 and other events in Austin. Maybe you've been in a similar place. You've stayed in an Airbnb and you thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. You could rent a spare bedroom.

You could rent your whole place when you're away. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter or you're planning on going somewhere warmer. While you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money towards the trip. Whether you use the extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home could be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host.

I do love that she still went out into Central Park every day. In her wheelchair with the dog that Griffin gave her, that she did not just lay down and die, right? There's a kind of a grim determination to her. Yeah, and to enjoy the outdoors and go, you know, see, you know, the bench for Quintana and go sit on the bench.

But your point about how ultimately those two terrible losses do fuel her greatest work. I mean, and no one would trade those things. Like even as a fan, you wouldn't trade those things. And certainly she as important as writing and being seen as a great writer to her was. No one would say, I'm so glad it happened because X.

But that is the job of the writer. That is the, even more than stringing words together, the real ability is to take the experiences of life and see the seed of an artistic idea or truth in them. And your magical thinking was so profoundly successful, you know, bestseller, bestseller became a Broadway play. It wins the National Book Award, right? Yeah, yeah.

Not because it was this tell-all by Joan Didion, but because it was essentially a guide to how to deal with death. And that's what people still to this day, right? Share it, it's like the number one book you give someone when they've lost someone because she was so open and transparent about her self delusions and also trying to understand what the process

of grieving was and she's at once, you know, pitiless in exposing herself, but also very human. Yeah, the specificity, it's the most vulnerable and personal and raw that she is in any of her writing, somehow is also the most general. And those are probably related to each other. Like she's so mind herself and what she went through that it is the most uniquely human of all of the things that she's done. Right, and let's face it,

like half of us are gonna lose a spouse, right? And particularly, women tend to outlive their husbands. And so she was speaking to something that's the widow, right, and four and- Death and taxes, she wrote a book that owns one of those two categories. Right, right, right. And on the tour for it, this people would just,

there's all these stories of the people who'd come up to her and thank her and crying. Which I think was really hard for her to deal with in some ways. It's a heavy weight. Yeah, yeah. But she went out there and held people's hands and let them...

Yeah, and I mean, like as I wrote this book called The Obstacles is the Way. And I think on a superficial level, The Obstacles is the Way is, hey, you can take these little things that happen to you and you can find, oh, actually there's this opportunity here. You can turn this around and, you know, your flight's delayed, you can use that as an opportunity

to go for a walk or whatever, right? Like there's little ways that you take the things that you thought were bad or that you didn't want to happen and turn them into good whatever, right? Like there's little ways that you take the things that you thought were bad or that you didn't want to happen and turn them into good things, right? But it's at that deeper level where you experience like profound tragedy and loss that you would never choose to have gone through. And it's not fair that you went through,

but it's this opportunity to find something within yourself that maybe you didn't know was there. And maybe if there's no redemption in what you do for you, the value, the opportunity is in what you help other people with, right? So it's like what she wrote and went through writing, losing her husband and daughter and writing these two books, it doesn't help her that much, right? I mean, there is something inherently therapeutic

about writing and processing. But the majority of the benefit, the value, is reaped by us, the reader, by the rest of the world. Do you know what I mean? She wrote, she created some, she took her pain and suffering and made it useful and educational and made other people feel less alone with it.

And that's the beauty of that. That's how she transformed that sort of unmitigated tragedy into something that had some, so like, had some value in it. Right, right. And just that concept of magical thinking that, she's basically saying it's okay to kind of lose your mind. Yes.

Because that's part of what- That's an act of grace she's providing other people. Yeah, yeah. You know, somewhat ironically, Yes, because that's part of what- That's an act of grace she's providing other people. Yeah, yeah. I, you know, somewhat ironically, I lost my dad in April as, you know, the book was in process. And it was just so helpful to have, you know,

immersed myself in Joan and understanding that a concept of magical thing is like, okay, I'm just gonna be insane for a while. And that's just what it is. And I'm not going to beat myself up over it and I'm just going to go through this. And that's what happens. Well, because she so unsparingly depicts

what a person going through unexpected loss and grief looks like, it then becomes a way for you to experience that a second time. So I guess what I'm saying is like, we only have the benefit of our own experience typically. And then if someone can detail their experience, then we go, oh, this is normal.

Or this is what it feels like. Or this is how other people help dealt with it. So what she's taking, and this is what art fundamentally is, I think, or the best art, is it's allowing people access into another world or another life and they can take or not take what they want from that. Right.

And so to take something as personal and specific as losing a husband and a daughter and depicting it in such a way that now anyone losing anyone can go, oh, I'm not losing my mind. This is how it looks and works. These aren't new feelings that no one has ever gone through is a profound gift. And that's what she transforms that experience into.

It doesn't make it go away. You don't go, well, I do miss my husband, but now I have a National Book Award. This is all cold comfort. But the service that she provides is primarily to the benefit of humanity and other people. Right. So let me ask you a philosophical question. Earlier you brought up what John says to her when they come home from the hospital. You don't have a choice. Yeah, and she says to him, you don't have

a choice and then he dies, she, yeah. And she says to him, you don't have a choice. And then he, then he dies, right? Was that his choice? Yeah, I did think about that. Like is it, I mean, is that, is that him going, I'm opting out of it right now. I don't think you can choose to have a heart attack. But there is some, there is something,

those are the two, I guess the deeper reading is, those are the two choices, right? Like you either die or you the two choices. Right. Like you either die or you go through it. Right, right. But like when we say to ourselves like, I just can't go on, I can't do this, one more thing goes wrong.

Like those are the two choices. Either like, cause we're not in control. So the only choice we have is to either carry on or not. Right, I mean, maybe he was explained to her why he was dying. He's like, I can't do it. Yeah, I don't have it in me. My time's up.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so. The Stoics talk, I mean, this is obviously not super politically correct today because we have a better understanding of mental health, but they saw suicide as they said, the open window. And their point was more like when you live in a time of tyranny and disease and where horrible things can happen.

Like they were saying like, if they can make you do it, then you don't know how to die. And they were talking about, when you live under a tyrannical emperor who wants you to sacrifice your values or do horrible things, like you always have this choice, right? And I don't think we need to take it that far, but it is the idea that like, look,

there are two choices you either deal with what's in front of you or you don't. Those are the two choices. But the real magical thinking is pretending it doesn't exist, lamenting how unfair it is, wishing it was other one. Like that's, I think that to me is where we get into a lot of trouble. It's not like people choose to die instead of dealing with their problems.

It's more like we pick this fake third option, which is like just putting off facing the fundamentally binary reality of life, which is you either keep going or you don't. Right, right. Like Mark Zirelius had this crippling stomach ailment that we don't know what it was exactly, but we get the sense you sort of like what we call today

has chronic pain. And he's even given like opium to deal with it. So it must have been extremely painful. And it's one passage in meditations. He says something that I think about a lot whenever I don't feel good. He goes like, he goes, either the pain will kill you or it'll stop.

Do you know what I mean? His point is like, life will either take care of this problem for you or you gotta figure out a way to keep going. Right. And again, there's something fundamentally binary and I think a little sad about that. Right.

But welcome to being a fucking person. Right. Like there's something kind of fundamentally sad and binary about the fact that we just, we're not in control. Right. And our problems will either, our problems either have a solution inside them

or they don't. Right, right. What do you think when she, what do you think she meant when she said that? That you don't have a choice. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, yeah, she was, she was, that was the very practical,

you know, rational, Joan Didion, right? Which is just, get over it. What are you gonna do instead, right? Just, we're not gonna deal with it. Like that's not the answer. And I obviously, she, I think, I think maybe he was like, I think maybe he knew it was killing him.

And she was, and she was trying to tell her. So do you think, and I do think there is this problem in some of the still like approaches or just people who are very logical and intellectual about things is that there's kind of a lack of empathy. Like that's a sad thing to have been the last words

that he says to your husband. True or not? Right, right. That's a sad thing to have said. Right. Basically buck up and deal with it. Even if that's what you need them to understand at the end of the conversation.

Right, right. It should have been, I don't know if I can deal with this either or I understand on top of your own issue, your health issues. Yeah, no, you're right. You can say, I agree, it is a lot. Right, right. But we're here in it together.

Do you know what I mean? Right, right. Or you could say, we don't have a choice. To me, the less than empathetic, bordering on cruel part of it, is she said, you don't have a choice. Right. There was an inherent, maybe we're parsing words too much, but she is saying like, you are alone.

Like this is, you have to put up with it, not we don't have a choice. Right. Although I'm sure she, I'm sure she knew that she was going to be, like she wasn't saying I can't deal with this. Yes. So she's like, I have to deal with it, you have to deal with it is how I read that.

But I'm just saying that a kinder way to say it is we have to deal with it. And we are like, if you're the stronger person in the situation and another person is having emotional issues or doubts or fears, like you can give them some of your strength, not saying you're being weak, you have to deal with this. And I think sometimes those of us who are kind of naturally that way,

or were raised in a certain tradition like that, we forget that other people are maybe not there yet, or they need to be reassured and built up as opposed to simply told to deal with it. And I think a lot of the book is actually her having that regret of not realizing just how bad he had been feeling physically and then emotionally on top of that with Quintana.

Like I think that that is part of her guilt and anxiety is that she didn't realize she wasn't prepared. And when he was saying, I can't deal with it, she thought he was just trying to bail instead of saying, I literally cannot deal with this. I mean, I took a lot of that from Blue Knights. Like you get the sense that she is, that Joan Dadeon is reckoning for the first time

having lost her daughter with what it must have actually been like to be her daughter, like to actually be that person. Like she obviously intellectually understood that it's hard to be adopted, but it seems like she maybe didn't, she was regretting having not been empathetic enough to her daughter who had to live with that every day.

And then you kind of get this sense that she's reckoning with this sense of, oh, what must it have been like to be my kid? And it wasn't all mansions in Malibu and literary parties. And then it was hard to be this person. And that's a haunting question to have to ask yourself as a parent. You know, you're dealing with the,

you get your child's suicide note or you attend a therapy session with your kid or they finally open up and share something with you and you realize, like, I think about this, it's like, let's say you find out your kid's dyslexic. Well, you didn't know they were dyslexic. All the times you were chiding them for not taking reading seriously or not paying attention.

Right? Right. Everyone always has issues in themselves and we're not always as patient or understanding as people, but especially as parents with what that other person is going through. And you get the sense that she was really wrestling with that after having lost her daughter.

Yeah, yeah, I think so too. And but I also feel the poignancy of that, that again, did John wrestle with these feelings? Sure. I think that John was also, I think they were both tried to be good parents, but I think they were very caught up in their careers and their lives.

And I mean, would we have, would we even be here talking about Joan Gideon if she had said, you know what, I can't write that book or that article because my daughter's going, which she did, she actually did, if you look at her output, she really did not write as much during the years

that they were raising Quintana. She really, there is a kind of pause in the novels for sure, in the long form pieces. And then it's when Quintana's in college and afterwards that her career really picks up again. If you want to focus more on your well being this year, you should read more and you should give Audible a try. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks focused on wellness from physical, mental, spiritual, social, motivational, occupational, and financial.

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So you shake hands and agree to do it. But it's all about to get a hell of a lot more complicated because the you in this story is Fergie, the Duchess of York, ex-wife of Prince Andrew, and the person who's offered you half a million pounds is an undercover tabloid reporter who's recorded the whole conversation. Oh, and just one more thing, promise, last one,

it's all about to appear on the front page of the news of the world. In the later season of British Scandal, we take you inside the story of the so-called fake shake, the investigative journalist Mazem Amoud, and the series of explosive sting operations he used to con public figures. From Fergie to singer Tleesa and former England football coach Sven Goran-Eriksson. Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts, listen early and ad free on Wondry Plus,

on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Honestly, a million pounds and I still wouldn't introduce you to him. And that's for your sake. Yeah, when we look at Joan Didion's life, we don't have to make exemptions or rationalizations the way we have to do for Hemingway, right? She's not an art monster in the way that most male artists were historically art monsters.

Right, right. And so like, yes, I think she did her best in a way that you can't even begin to say that lots of artists did do their best. Right. But most of us are probably gonna reflect back on who we were when our kids were younger and go, I didn't always prioritize the right things.

I was more selfish than I needed to be. I was harder on them than I needed to be. I prioritize things that don't matter to me as much in retrospect. And what's so unflinchingly honest and then also selfless about that book is that she did that. And you as the reader could read it and feel, and hopefully just do, if it makes you 1% better,

that's a profound gift that she gave you and your family. Right, right. I liked, you noted this one thing in your book, you were saying like Joan Didion is in a lot of press photos and author photos, she's like with her kit. Yeah. And you've never seen a male artist do that. And I think about that, like people come to the bookstore

and they'll like, it's Ryan here and I'll say hi and they'll ask me a couple of questions. If I'm not here, but my wife is here, they'll ask my wife where our kids are. Right. You know, nobody ever asked me where my kids are. They assume somebody else is taking care of them for me. And that it's appropriate and natural

that I am where I am without them. Right. But there is this inherent judgment in women that if they are not with them, they are playing hooky or something. Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely. And, you know, Joan did keep Quintana with her

and took her on the road with her, took her in hotel rooms, which maybe wasn't the best place for this poor child, you know, to be. But, you know, she did keep her very close to her side. And, you know, part of the, talked earlier about the flap over the photograph on democracy, you know, that photo was taken by Quintana. And yeah, and Joan was very insistent that that be the photograph that was used.

Like she was trying to support her daughter's art, right? The flip side of that is that I also saw these letters from the agent to Quintana as Quintana starting college at Bennington. Like, can you please send me those photos? I need more of them, I need more of them. And I just have this picture of this poor girl, like just starting college and having to deal with,

you know, this thing for her mom, you know, which I'm sure in the one hand she's like, happy to have her photos published, but then maybe she just wants to go and have like that crazy freshman year, right? It's certainly a first world problem, but I struggle with it. I go back and forth between like, okay, if you're successful, you have an interesting life, you have a cool job, you get afforded these opportunities to go places and do things. And there's one version where, you know,

you neglect your family to reap the rewards of that. And then there's this, on the other end of that spectrum, there's the version where because you like your family and you wanna be around them, you wanna bring them and you go, isn't this cool? We get to go do this in Joan Danean's case. We're gonna go spend two months in Hawaii while your dad and I finished this script.

Or like for me, it's like, oh, I'm doing this talk in Jackson Hole. You guys should come and I bring them these places and they experience these things. But is actually the nicer, more responsible thing in the long run to let them stay at home and have a normal life, right? And you get the sense that part of what Didion is reckoning

with is like, was I fooling myself that this was cool and enjoyable for her when actually it was stressful on my kid and destabilizing on my kid. And actually she didn't care that she had access to the pool at the Royal Hawaiian. We had a pool at home that we could have been swimming in that we were never able to do.

Or she didn't want to be with us at all. She wanted to be hanging out with her friends. And I think that is a modern parenting problem. And it's a, it's a, it's a high class parenting problem. Right, right. But it doesn't mean it's not a problem. Right, right, right. I mean, of course, like all working parents deal

with these, these issues. And, you know, yeah, it's definitely a luxury problem to, you know, say you could take your child with you to work in a glamorous setting. Poor Joan, to the end, poor Joan of John. It's poor like, poor Quintana. Right, right. Right, like.

Yeah. Yeah, but I also think that Quintana loved a lot of it and I think she did really feel close to her mother. What made me think of it is I read this interview with Susan Sarandon's daughter, whose name I'm forgetting, which she's now an actress. And she was asked like what it was like growing up on movie sets, because her parents,

her mom would take her with her. And her mom's also, again, these again, this is like the first generation of moms who could do this. Right. So we should stipulate that, but she was saying, obviously I was glad to be with my mom, but it was also traumatic

because I would spend months on a movie set, meet all these people, develop these friendships, that would be my life. Right. And then it was like we were circus carnies and then we left and I never saw those people again. And so she gives this interview and she's sort of describing her feelings about it.

And Susan Sarandon is then asked about that. And Susan Sarandon is like, basically totally disregards it. She's like, hey, I was doing the best I could. It was actually amazing. And think of all the people that she got to meet and now look, this is her job. She was like, I was very convinced

that it was the best thing for her and what an incredible opportunity she should be grateful for it. And I think there is that tendency, like you do your best as a parent, you make the decision you think is right, but it doesn't change the fact that your kids have their own feelings about it.

And they might not like it, right? Like it might have been awesome and they could still hate it or it could still have affected them negatively. And I really was touched in Blue Nights with the sense that Joan Didion really was wrestling with, hey, was this the idyllic, amazing, privileged childhood that I thought it was for my daughter? Or was she really struggling in ways that I was blind to

and should have been more compassionate and understanding and how do they contribute to the problems that she had later in life? I don't think that Joan ever thought it was wonderful and idyllic. Yeah. I think that there was enough clear issues along the way that she talks about in Blue Nights, that she knew that it was pro—and all of the novels are problematic relationships

between mothers and daughters in some cases in which the daughters are hospitalized or killed. Yeah. I mean, you could write a whole book just analyzing those, right? The fictional representations of her real life. Yeah, and you don't, you know, she doesn't get to do it over, right? No, none of us do. So I think there is something,

I think it's why it's important to read books like these and to ask these questions, because you're getting extra at bats by looking at the experiences of other people and the mistakes they made and the things they did right and the lessons they learned or the things that they came to understand too late.

Right, right. And that's kind of the haunting thing about both those books is she's coming to these realizations. Right. Months too late. Right. She misses it by months. Right, right, right.

And then it can help if people, you know, like you, dads like do say, hey, here's my kids, ask me about my kids or make sure that people don't just, or when you talk to people, ask the dads about the kids too, right? Yeah, no, there is something weird where men just don't, like I've talked about this, but it's like men have this secret life where they also have children

and it's separate from the work and they don't talk about it and they don't go, I gotta leave the office because they're gonna pick them up. There is, I think that does a grave disservice because it makes it abnormal, right? It's like, why if you hear like Pete Buttigieg takes paternity leave and everyone makes him sound like he's a crazy lazy person, you know?

And we would not be having that conversation about a female Cabaret secretary taking maternity leave. Right, right, right. And so the normalization of a very normal part of life is actually really important. Right, right, absolutely. What did you think, another parenting thing, she has that kind of haunting line where she says,

in only in retrospect, did I realize I was raising her as a doll. Well, yeah, oh my gosh. What does she mean by that? That I think that she was not, she was raising her as she would want her daughter to behave, not as her daughter was actually behaving, or who she wanted her daughter to be, not as her daughter

actually was. I actually think that less damaging for Quintana was the travel and the hotel rooms. I feel like the thing that really upset her was the move to Brentwood and leaving Malibu. And that that seems to have been, she called it the suburban house and going to Harvard Westlake or Westlake as it was then the girls prep school and having that kind of intense academic environment. It seems like that was the disruptive.

And I'm basing that really on how Joan wrote about these things. I mean, also what people told me about, you know, but Joan quoted her saying, you know, that was the suburbia home. She didn't want to be in suburbia. There was someone that she fit, and there was a life she was happy with, and they blew it apart for reasons

that were less than clear. Right, right. And I mean, largely so that Quintana could go to this school apparently is, you know, what one of Jones' cousins told me was that that was a big part of the move that they didn't want her going to school in Malibu, but you know, school was probably not as important to, and this is like a great, you know, one of these great ironies of Joan Didion

is that she wrote a couple times about like, why do parents put this obligation, you know, to do well in school and go to the right colleges and live their lives through their kids. And then she apparently did exactly that with her daughter, right? Which I could be talking about myself as well, right? Yeah. We think that, and we do, you know, we can, and we do this as writers, we can be great.

We tell ourselves these stories, right? Yeah, in order to live. Yeah. And then we make our decisions though, based on like keeping up with the Joneses or whatever feels safest or, you know, the least. Nobody thinks they're gonna regret moving to put their kids in better schools, but you don't know right right right?

Yeah, I'm my I moved From one side of Sacramento to the other my parents like got us into a much area with much better schools You know much fancier neighborhood that we're like we went from top end of a middle-class neighborhood to the low end of a upper-middle-class neighborhood Right to them. You know, they're like they're sacrificing for to give us opportunities. And all, all it meant to me was like, I have to start over as a person, right, as an introverted, creative boy in a, in a environment in which I'm not well suited or of this class or scene, do you know what I mean? And so, yeah, that ability to go, not what does this look like on paper,

but what does this actually mean for my kid, the person? Not like, hey, this school is statistically better than that school. Right. Or their career prospects are better or whatever, but like, how will it actually affect them is probably the harder thing to think about. Right, right.

And it's also quite possible and even probable that really they, Joan and John, were just tired of being way up there in Trancas. It was really far from the center of activity. It was beautiful as it was. It was far from Hollywood and. And who knows, there might have been other problems that they were getting away from.

There were snakes. There were snakes. I wanna talk about snakes too. No, I thought it was interesting that, talking about, hey, in retrospect, I realized I was raising my kid as a doll. I think about that, like when I see, and then when you have the impulse, it's like,

hey, let's all pose for this photo, or let's all wear the matching outfits, or let's all become like, when you're, and I think it's particularly common when you have like celebrities, or now in this world of social media, to make your kid an accessory to the story you are telling the world, right?

We tell ourselves stories to live. That's what social media is fundamentally about. Your story of you as a parent, as a brand, as a person, whatever, and your kids can so easily become props in that. And it is not a victimless crime. Right, right, right. It's gross and it also is, it fucks them up. Right, right.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, you don't, you know, and I wrote a book about being a mom. I wrote a book called Mama Rama, which a lot of it was about this, like how to balance all those different, I don't even like you were balanced, how to like throw yourself into the convulsions of parenting, working, playing,

and having an identity that isn't just about parenting, but then that is part of it too, right? I mean, it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to do and to do right. And, you know, yeah, as my son who's now 20, he knows that he was in that book. And, you know, yeah, as my son who's now 20, he knows that he was in that book. He's in the book as a toddler or my stepdaughters also. Yeah, it's, you know, it's a, I feel,

and my stepdaughters were able to read it beforehand, but my son was too young. We were just at the beach and we were trying to take some photo as the sunset, as the sun was going down. And our kids were being crazy. Like our two boys were just being insane, like throwing sand and flipping upside down

and making weird faces. And you get this, you find the words coming out of your mouth, you're ruining the picture out of your mouth, you're ruining the picture. Right, right, right. That's not possible. What is this picture for? Right, this is the picture.

Right, the picture is to capture what's happening. What's happening is that you're being crazy because you're seven years old. And that's who you are. And it's wonderful. And we love that. But just the act of the picture or the act of writing about it or the act of,

whatever the medium that the thing is being captured in, just it existing creates this sort of artifice or this appearance that we're trying to keep up. And I think for her, it was probably her reputation. For Diddy, it's the her, it was probably her reputation for Diddy. And it's the reputation. It's the scene. It's it's her sense of who she is as a mother. Right. And and and that your kid is is a prop in that as opposed to just a human being.

Right. Right. And yeah. And and, you know, from the beginning, Quintana was in the photos, and after they've officially adopted her, they take her to out to show her off at a fancy restaurant. Like that's their idea of how to celebrate. Look at us, we're the perfect family. Right. We're the cool parents. Right.

Right. And also I think for a woman, as I see, I am also a good mom. I'm an adequate as a woman that just because I am a successful writer, doesn't mean I can't also be a nurturer and fulfill my duties. And even though she was having trouble, you know, naturally being

a mother, I'm sure. I am a mom, I can't have kids. Yeah. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with me or us. Right. And it's interesting that, you know, there are so many photographs, you know, of Joan with Quintana or both of the parents with Quintana, not so many of John and Quintana that we talked about before, and that then Quintana becomes a photographer, right? So used to being around cameras, and then to also wanting to take control of the lens. And that then there ends up being this flap over the flap,

the book flap of the photograph that Quintana takes from mom that's to revealing for the New York Times. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Francopern. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. This season has everything. It's got political ideology. It's got nuclear Armageddon. It's got love story. It's got betrayal. It's got

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to her not getting into Stanford. Right, but she didn't care. Yeah, do you think he did that right? I was thinking about that, right? Like it's funny how, you know, flash forward all these years later, we're still struggling with that exact thing, even more so. Like Stanford was probably 500 times easier to get into when she's applying than it is now. Right. Right. Well, ironically, she got into Berkeley, which is, I think, even harder to get into Stanford now, but yeah.

Well, there was that golden age where the University of California really was for the people of California. And it was affordable and accessible. And essentially, if you graduated from high school, you could go there. Right. You know, right now, like all things in college, it's much, much harder and more complicated. But we have walked me through how she gets this crushing blow,

which is Joan Dillion's dream was to go to Stanford, she gets the rejection letter. So even though this is 50 plus years ago, the same fundamental parenting issue is there and how are dad responds? Right. Right. So yeah, she went to public. It's interesting because she did go to public schools for all her privilege. She was a product of the public schools of Sacramento, which her grandparents were members of the school board. So they did have this belief in public education, but nonetheless, she went to Stanford, the private college. And she was so confident that in her ability to get in,

that it's the only place that she applied for. And then she gets the rejection letter, which she then, you know, pins to her wall and has pinned to her wall keeps with her forever. I think as, you know, a lesson to herself, not to take anything for granted. Sure. And she ends up actually going to community college in Sacramento, Sacramento City College,

where now there's a scholarship in her name. They've just renamed the library after Joan Didion because she did have that brief time of going there and the family did donate money from the estate sale to Sacramento City College. But her dad just shrugs it off. Yeah, yeah. She's not from a family where that's that important. And this is also when her father was also an alcoholic

and a very dark presence in the house. It doesn't give her a beer? Yes, yes, he does. That's his reaction. And she ends up applying to Berkeley and getting into Berkeley and going there. But yeah, she doesn't, it wasn't that her parents had that on her

that she had to go to Stanford. That was her own. There's like two ways to think about it. One is he's indifferent and doesn't care. That's probably not great. I kind of took from it, it's like, maybe he had more confidence in his daughter than her daughter and his daughter did,

which is like, she thought her life was over and he understood that this meant literally nothing. Right. In no way was who she was going to become We thought her life was over and he understood that this meant literally nothing. Right. That in no way was who she was going to become or how successful she was gonna be or what her life was going to look like. In no way was it dependent on this private school

up the road, giving her a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Yeah. It may be, I think there's some of that. I just think that it didn't matter that much to him. It's interesting she doesn't talk about her mother's reaction. It's true. Cause that I think maybe it would have mattered. Yeah, maybe it takes away the concede of the essay.

But yeah, I sort of took the idea from the essay, which is she's going, even then, parents cared way too much about this. Right. And that it's way lower stakes than you think. which is she's going, even then, parents cared way too much about this. And that it's way lower stakes than you think. And they're way, like you could argue that the personality traits they did instill in her, the resilience and the determination,

the sense of self, the self-respect, character, et cetera. These ultimately are way more predictive of who she's gonna be and way more necessary for what life has in store for her. of who she's gonna be and way more necessary for what life has in store for her. Like, you know, when you lose your husband and your daughter back to back, you're not like, what did I learn at Stanford that will help me with this?

Right, right. You're drawing on something much deeper and it's a different kind of tradition that you're drawing from. Right, right. I think her mom was probably more projecting that her wish is for Joan to succeed than the dad was. And I think that's part of like probably the dad's depression.

But like, you know, it was the mom who had like said, you know, apply for the Preetapari, you know, when she was a young girl of Oak prize, which is what ultimately takes Joan to New York to, you know, really begin her career. Yeah, I feel like the mom, you know, the mom's the one that gave her the notebook. Yeah, it's interesting that for all Joan going away and being very clear that, you know, she wanted to get out of out of Dodge out of Sacramento, right? That she always went back there to write as long as her parents were still living there, that she would go to her old bedroom and, and write.

Yeah. Until, until they moved. And then she went to Hawaii. Right. Yeah, the Hawaii connection to Sacramento is maybe an underexplored one. Cause it's so close. I think people don't realize how close it is. Everyone else, it's the sort of exotic thing.

I mean, it's closer than New York city. Right, right. You know, like it's, and it's, it's a part of a, if you're in California, Hawaii is much more a part of America, you know, the American conception. Then it is if you live basically anywhere else in the US. Right, the way New Yorkers go to Florida. Yeah. You know, yes, Californians go to Hawaii.

That's really true. And she wrote about, you know, sitting on the Pacific Ocean, you know, in California, Berkeley probably, looking off across the ocean and imagining Hawaii there. And that, you know, one of the things that the book is about, it's called The World, according to Joan Didion, because I felt that she wrote so much with a sense of place. She wrote a lot about place and that she had these very deep connections to the places that she wrote about.

So that was a lot of what I did, was travel to these places and try to see them the way that Joan Didion saw them. Even places she wasn't there very long, like her road trip through the South is some of the best American writing, I think ever done on the South. And she was like, I mean,

the whole thing's like three weeks or something. Yeah, yeah. And which she went there with a kind of romantic notion that was utterly destroyed by her time there. It's funny, just we read travels with Charlie by Steinbeck, right? And also his writing about the South at a very similar time in the 60s.

I think hers is like 70, she was there. An interesting time to be traveling in the South, not a time to make one feel good about Dixie, right? No. Do you see Kevin come from Sacramento? Do you see similarities between the Delta region of Sacramento and the Mississippi Delta? It is weird.

Like you don't think of, well, first of all, when people think of California, they think Los Angeles and San Francisco, and they don't think of, well, first off, when people think of California, they think Los Angeles and San Francisco, and they don't realize that the whole middle is much closer to the Midwest and the South. And yeah, even Sacramento, it feels like this, currently Sacramento is a very landlocked city, right? It doesn't feel like a river city,

which it was for hundreds of years, you know? And my parents had a small boat that they was in the Delta, so we would go down there all the time. But even then, it never connected to my sense of the place. And I've talked about this, like what I've only after you leave the place, can you understand it?

But like, I never, I didn't know Joan DeDyn was from Sacramento. It never came up. It wasn't talked about. Right. There was no sense that any artists were really from Sacramento at all. Even California, because California is so eclipsed

by Hollywood and not even historical Hollywood, but like modern Hollywood, you see it as a place where blockbuster movies are made, not necessarily as an artistic place and a place with a history of literature. Like you don't think of Fitzgerald writing in LA or Faulkner writing in LA. Or these great novelists. And so my understanding of California has changed

and shifted as I've fallen in love with these writers who were reflecting on that place and telling me about stuff about it that no one talked to me about when I was a kid. Like Sacramento exists in this sort of weird historical limbo where like you can go to old sack and the old town is preserved as it was and then everything else is new and fake.

Right. And that is- But the old town is fake too. Because- Of course it is. Was it really? Yeah, it's old wood building. So they've all burned down and been replaced like a thousand times. Right, but she, you know, mocks and where I was from, right?

She's what, that's when she like, that's her ultimate, that's her moment of epiphany. Yeah. It's like, you know, that seems her fairytales. Yeah. This is, this is make believe. It always was make believe, right? But even Joan's childhood growing up in, in the sort of, there are a bunch of historic houses in Sacramento, but like, like most cities, everyone fled the urban core

and moved to the suburbs. This is what white flight was all over the United States. So even if you grow up in a city like Sacramento, for the most part, you grow up in the suburbs of the town. So like you live in a place that everything is 20 years old at most. And so you have this kind of a historical place

where you're not, you just don't have a sense of what was happening or why or the history of it. And then so what you feel when you move to the South as I wrote my first book when I was in New Orleans, even though there is the odiousness of the Confederacy and chattel slavery over all of it, everything is old and historic in a way that is so different than where I was from.

Right, right. And there's just, I think I took to that as a writer because it was so the opposite of what I grew up with. But there is, I mean, she did grow up in that huge Victorian house that was- No, no, those houses were there. But like 90%, 95% of people in Sacramento are growing up in a suburban house.

Right. And that area was really not nice. Like even like now those houses are worth a lot and they're stuffed downtown. Right. But Sacramento was like a town where like government is happening, but that's on very specific. Like you do not go, like you don't go to downtown.

You would go to downtown Sacramento to see Sutter's Fort and to visit the capital. The Camilla's at the capital. Like for one field trip in elementary school, and then that's the extent of your, I remember downtown Sacramento being the place we drove past on the way to Arco Arena where the Kings played.

And now that is downtown, they moved that downtown. But like that's just just like for my generation, that's there wasn't that everyone wanted to live in new fake McMansion land. Right, right. Which, you know, the Diddy and family- Was responsible for it. Yeah, a lot of that, right?

She just, you know, she doesn't completely ever 100%. She criticizes that, but she doesn't say, it's actually my family that's been doing a lot of that. Because again, I don't think she wanted to portray her brother who was part of the, he was the one in charge of the property. Yeah, she also probably liked the money. She also got a lot of money for it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the Epton Sinclair thing about it, how it's hard to understand something that your salary depends on you not understanding. Right. And so she could see it in other people and in other ways. Right. And she could see it much more, I think,

in Southern California than she could in Northern California. Right, she criticizes the Hollisters. Yeah. But I think she does that as a replacement for criticizing the Didians. That makes sense. I do. I think like everything she says about the Hollister's,

and you know, Michelle Chihara has wrote a great essay like criticizing Jen for not owning up to it, but I'm like, she wasn't going to criticize her family in that public of a way. And that was her like backdoor to doing it. Well, that ties into something I wanted to close with. She has this great line that you, oh, it won?

Yeah, what time is it? 1257. Okay. All right. Last thing you say in the book, you have this great line. You say writing is a hostile act. Right. And I think she didn't want to say certain things

because it was hot. You were accusing people in print of things, but also she does have this sense that like, there is that fundamental betrayal and aggressiveness in writing and telling somebody else's story. Yeah. And people have criticized her for having that approached.

Like, oh, the journalist shouldn't be thinking of it as confrontational or whatever, you should work with your subject, which, you know, I understand and agree. And I, you know, just teach my journalism students to act with care and ethics about everyone they talk to. But the fact of the matter is, you know, someone has this whole life

and you're just gonna write about this one part of it. and that's, you know, that's a kind of killing off of the other parts. And, you know, people rarely like what is written about them, no matter, you know, unless you say that they are the second coming of Christ. Then you're not doing your job. Right. Right. And then you're not doing your job anyways. So, yeah, your obligation is to the truth to your audience, not to your subject. And often, you know, depending on the circumstance, you know, she's going to tell that they're giving the toddlers acid in the commune, even though that's going to get people in trouble, because the world needs to know that and you have to be able to make those tough choices. Well, yeah, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, which means they're telling the story. Yes.

And it's probably self-serving. Right. And now you're telling a story, which is your point of view and what you see it, and chances are that's gonna be, those two stories are gonna be in conflict. So there is inherently something aggressive and confrontational about telling the story.

Yeah, yeah, I always tell my students, like you don't burn your bridges on purpose, but it's probably gonna happen. And your obligation is to get the story that needs to be told out there. When don't you think that's what she's saying in that commencement address? Like these platitudes about like,

plant a tree, we're all friends. Like the truth is the truth. These, the reality is complicated and feelings get hurt. And to throw yourself into the convulsions of the world is meaning, means if I say this thing, it's gonna have negative consequences for some people. Even if that person could be evil,

but I liked them when we were talking, or this person could be really nice, and good, but totally incompetent. You know, there's all these different factors at play. And she sort of fearlessly wrote what she thought needed to be written. Right, right. And, you know, ultimately went after people

in positions of great power or, you know, cases of great injustice, like the Central Bar case. Yeah, it's like as long as you're doing it, it's a hostile act and you're punching up rather than down. It's probably, that's what you have to be concerned about. Is this person have power that I'm going after or is this just picking on an ordinary person who happens to be what ordinary people are, which is contradictory and hypocritical and all these other things.

Right. Right. I actually think that she really tried to speak. People think that she was such an elitist and I get it. But she always said that like her friends were the ones that hung out at the gas station and that the point of the notebooks was about the girl in the plaid silk dress, which was her, which was the bystander.

I think that she, you know, she criticized politicians because they weren't speaking for the people or to the people and they were betraying them. So I feel like she was a good steward of those people at the gas station that she grew up with in Sacramento. I think so too. Well, thank you very much. This was amazing. Thank you so much, Rana.

Of course. I really appreciate too. Well, thank you very much. This was amazing. Thank you so much for an early appreciate it. Yeah Thanks so much for listening if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes that would mean so much to us And it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. and listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus and Apple Podcasts. Where can I get help hiring people with disabilities? There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians with disabilities who are ready to work, and many local organizations are available to help you find qualified candidates and make your workplace more accessible and inclusive. Visit Canada.ca slash right here to connect with one near you today. A message from the Government of Canada.