The Morning News has a great memoir piece, a very new journalism/memoir style called "Joan Didion Crosses the Street." Out of a simple chance encounter with Joan Didion on a public street V.L. Hartmann reconstructs the significance of Joan Didion to her own childhood and her parents generation:
When I was a teenager my mother explained the ‘60s and ‘70s to me by giving me her worn copies of Joan Didion’s collected essays. Haight-Ashbury was Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Howard Hughes was “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38.” I knew “John Wayne: a Love Song” before I had any idea who John Wayne was. My mother read these titles off to me with a deep reverence and it sounded like a different language. This was before I knew writers to have distinct styles. I would not understand the full meaning of many of the cultural references in Didion’s work until later re-readings in college, but I learned to associate the eras of my parents’ youth with the severe rhythm of a Didion sentence. I did not see Didion’s style as belonging to Didion; I saw it simply as the way sentences were written before I was born. I thought it was as much an indication of time passing as the yellow of the pages. My mother was captivated by Didion’s California and it became the California of my imagination. I would read “Los Angeles Notebook” and get the words mixed up with my mother’s voice.
One minor note of correction that seems pedantic. At the end, Harmann quotes her mother quoting Didion, the famous repeated line of "The Year of Magical Thinking," which says, "Life changes in an instant." Hartmann then says that this is a cliche line, but it becomes uncliche since it's Joan Didion who's writing it — Didion, who built sentences stronger than any architectural edifice, whose cadences served as a model for a generation's writing.
But despite Didion's pedigree, it would still be cliche if that was actually Didion's line. The line is actually: "Life changes in the instant."
I would have overlooked the altered article of speech if I hadn't been astonished by its use before. When I read the book, shortly before hearing Didion speak at the LA Times Festival of Books, that line arrested me. I actually thought: why not write the conventional line? "Life changes in an instant." But then I knew: because it would be a cliche.
And just by tweaking an article she avoids the cliche — what George Orwell calls the "dying metaphor." It's not insignificant, either, and not meaningless. "The" instant makes this particular moment a seismic moment in life. "A" moment reduces the moment into the herd of other moments.
It's the tiny twist of a master stylist, and one that shouldn't be overlooked.
