Blog Posts

Joan Didion and the Crime of Getting Old

April 13, 2015 By Victoria Robinson

One day while doing research online, I came across an article in the Atlantic about author Joan Didion. Since my first love is literature, I immediately clicked the link. Gracing the piece was a black-and-white photograph of Didion in 1977, looking as cool and meticulous as her carefully crafted prose reads. The image evoked memories of that slightly hopeful, slightly anxious time and primed me for reflections on Didion’s life.

The text itself began much closer to the present. It quoted three writers debating the merits and flaws of Didion’s 2005 memoir of widowhood, The Year of Magical Thinking. The article’s first paragraph ended with a dramatic denunciation of the book: “Stephen Metcalf, however, considered the book at best an artistic failure, and at worst an example of unintentional high comedy…” 

Wow! Artistic failure? Unintentional high comedy? Didion wrote Magical Thinking eight months after her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack. I lost my mother to a heart attack the same year Didion lost her husband, so I was curious whether her experience of loss would resonate with me. But when the book first came out, I did not have enough distance from my own pain to read it. Calling it “unintentional high comedy” seemed over-the-top. It made me question Metcalf’s judgment: Had he never lost someone extremely important in his life? Was the emotional territory of grief too uncomfortable, or was grief not a dramatic enough subject for memoir?

At the time the article was written, Magical Thinking had won the National Book Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2007, it was adapted for Broadway—as a drama, not a comedy. The book’s artistic value had been sufficiently acknowledged. I decided the denunciation was included for effect, like a hyperbolic cliff-hanger that would be, by article’s end, resolved. I’d never heard of Stephen Metcalf or the recorder of his words, Caitlin Flanagan.

A few paragraphs later, the focus shifted to Flanagan herself. Flanagan had met Didion in 1975, when Flanagan’s father was chairman of the English department at University of California-Berkeley. Didion was a visiting lecturer, invited to dinner at the Flanagan home. Caitlin was 14.

I was 13 in 1975. Flanagan and I were a year apart. Now I was hooked.

About halfway through the long and vaguely catty piece, I was stopped by the following pronouncement:

Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore. Where was the Didion who was a Goldwater girl and a Nixon voter, the Republican at Berkeley, the woman who didn’t care at all about the prevailing literary and political fashions, who went to the supermarket in an old bikini and boarded first-class compartments of international flights in bare feet, and who therefore—because she thought about things always on her own terms—could see things in front of us that we’d been missing all along? How could someone that original turn into another tired espouser of the most doctrinaire New York Review of Books political opinions? How could the woman who crafted sentences so original they made us fall in love with her have turned out decades of prose about which Katie Roiphe can rightly say, “Her words are clichés—her sentences and her rhythms and her tics are clichés because we know them so well”? It’s because she got old.

Joan Didion’s crime is that she got old? Really?

I reread the paragraph, counting the use of “old” five times. Yep, Flanagan really wants the word to sink in. She adds “personal” to make it clear she’s not just talking about Didion’s writing style.

The deliberate articulation of age prejudice shocked me. If I were Flanagan’s editor, I would have challenged her about it, so I was doubly irritated that the Atlantic editors let it fly. Damning someone’s writing because of the person’s age is not a valid critique.

Instead of a critique, Flanagan inserts a bizarre non sequitur, a personal attack, something akin to a well-rehearsed tantrum. She dispatches selective details— Goldwater girl, Nixon voter, bare-footed flights, an old bikini—in an authoritative gush. But to ensure we haven’t forgotten her original point about aging, Flanagan concludes as she began, “It’s because she got old.”

For me, the experience of reading that sentiment was like receiving a brick to the head after being led down a meandering path strewn with insidery bits about Didion’s UC-Berkeley stint and random quotes from Didion’s now-classic nonfiction and first novel. Then zing! Ambush.

But while Flanagan demonstrates she’s familiar with Didion’s work from the ’60s and ’70s, she seems not to have read Magical Thinking, which she never again refers to in her archly malevolent article. I finished confused. Why would Flanagan use the book as a lure in the opening paragraphs?

Because Flanagan is my age, I also wondered what she considers “old.” She was 50 when her article came out: middle-aged, neither young nor old. A Google search revealed that Stephen Metcalf is middle-aged too, but Flanagan describes him as a “young critic” in her first paragraph. Does that mean she considers herself a young critic?

Sometimes ageism—stereotyping, bias or discrimination against someone because of that person’s age—is hard to identify. Other times it’s blatant. To me, Flanagan’s age-bashing was blatant. But I had no idea if other readers would notice or care.

In the comments that followed the article, several readers objected to Flanagan’s flogging Didion for her age.

• But somehow I’ve noticed that female writers often get junked when they’re “old” like Flanagan says.

• This was a frustrating article to read, for a number of reasons. It starts out as lit crit, but never answers the question (to me anyway) of what her artistic crime is/was . . . beyond getting old? Disappointing.

• Isn’t this the same as saying, old people do not matter, their thoughts, their grieving, the process of their life as in stories of their life . . . do not matter. Growing older, being old is not a crime, but dishonoring the old is a crime against humanity because that is its natural course.

Not only had other readers noticed, they spoke out, and in doing so, they lent dignity to the discussion.

I write about this experience for several reasons. First, I want to show what ageism looks like and how it pops up—in the mainstream, when we least expect it, directed at anyone and sometimes with intent. What I didn’t know when I read the article is that Flanagan is a known provocateur, skilled at stirring up controversy.

Second, I want to show what people can do about ageism. We don’t have to perpetuate a precedent that older female writers “get junked.” There’s no law that says that older people’s stories don’t matter. We can set a new precedent: by adding our voices to the public discourse online and elsewhere, we can change the dynamics of prejudice. Someday, when a strong enough chorus objects to ageism, publishers like the Atlantic will notice.

I suspect Flanagan’s young/old dichotomy is an expression of her personal anxiety about aging. The irony is, Flanagan engages in her own magical thinking: if she identifies with Didion’s younger persona and rejects Didion’s real-life aging, might she magically arrest her own aging?

Didion, meanwhile, keeps honing her craft, keeps documenting her experiences and the world as she sees it. In Magical Thinking, she describes her self-assignment:

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

You’d never know about Didion’s attempt to make sense of the profound from reading Flanagan’s essay. In fact, you might never read Didion at all if you read Flanagan first.

In my case, stumbling upon Flanagan’s ageist rant reminded me to search for my copy of Magical Thinking. In it I found the same power to captivate me as I find in all of Didion’s work. She remains an important voice, undiminished by her personal losses, undiminished by age. Consider reading her, whether for the magic of her thinking or as an act of protest against ageism.

Post a Comment