Support our work. Many of us expect our women writers to lay their emotions bare. But as this excerpt from 'Slouching Toward Los Angeles' reveals, emotion does not define meaning for California's native daughterβand that can be a hard lesson. This article was made possible because of the generous support of DAME members.
We urgently need your help to keep publishing. I wanted her heart because of how I venerated the exacting lucidity and fearsome organization of her mind. I wanted her heart to be as messy as mine, but I could never find that mess etched on her pages.
But even when her life became redefined by grief, even in her self-revelation, she remained unreachable. Her later memoirs of enduring the deaths of her husband and daughter refused to offer the emotional enmeshment and catharsis I sought, even when she exposed, in writing, her survival of the unimaginable. What matters is what she witnesses, not how she feels about it. In the American chaos, she sees with startling clarity.
That is where the meaning lies. For Didion, emotion is not currency, nor does it hold necessary or defining meaning. Nor will she exist as the mirror of any of us, and certainly not all of us. Such tenets and practices are at odds with what we expect of our women writers, our women at all. There is no fray that claims her, no quicksand that she wades into alongside us, to be swallowed whole.
She would not politicize her gender. While the writing about deathβso much messy death, yet written with absolute controlβwould come later in considering her own loss; the writing about blood and birth never would. To that point, I often think of how Didion became a mother. Giving birth does not make a woman a mother, any more than motherhood makes one a woman.
