This was a few years shy of that period of Joan Didion mania, followed soon by fatigue, a time between 2013 and 2015 when several publications of note were overrun with material about the author that culminated in a review of her biography in the Atlantic, which momentarily entertained the grim idea that “for all her brilliance, she might be deemed too haughty to tolerate, the ultimate white girl.”1 We were suddenly bombarded with stories on the literary and societal significance of Joan, two biographies of her were released, a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary about her was funded in record time, and the octogenarian Joan herself starred in a campaign for the elite fashion line Céline. Haley Mlotek at the Hairpin described the campaign as the convergence of two “mental shortcuts”: Joan as the patron saint of well-read white women in their twenties and Céline as a signifier for a discerning aesthetic eye for minimalist design, if not a bank account for purchasing said designs. Mlotek wrote, “I didn’t feel trolled because Céline was mocking me, or us, but because I had been so thoroughly and effectively target marketed, an experience that is like being a deer in branded headlights. We’ve been seen! I panicked. They know too much!”2
But that day on the beach in 2011 was before all that, or at least before I knew it. Back then, adoring Joan Didion was a private devotion that I could indulge without the attendant self-consciousness that comes with being too caught up in a cultural moment to really enjoy it. And so I recklessly imbued her fiction with images of Joan herself. I imagined the protagonist Maria Wyeth as physically identical to her, inserting her into the scenes as an avatar inspired by the many photos of Joan where she is either leaning onto or out of a car. Though the photos rarely indicate the actual climate, they have hints of the desert complemented by her disinterested expression that never quite becomes a scowl. She smokes cigarettes indoors in several, too, a tragically lost art I’ve dared to engage in only while drunk or alone. Her words are known to conjure strong emotions in her readers, but Joan herself remains inscrutable. Fusing the attractive fiction of Joan established in my mind with the interior life of Maria Wyeth as set out on the page made a superheroine to imitate so that I might replace the effusive, clumsily emotive woman I was.
In the story, California is a state that comprises not gated communities and spray tans but extramarital affairs between film producers and impressively ambivalent women. It is a state connected by battered highways guarded by wizened amphibians, and the sordid mysteries of a destination where everyone has come to escape from someplace else. I envied Maria her sparse but carefully chosen words; I coveted the remarks people made about her weighing too little and being standoffish to the point of pathology. Maria appeared to feel so little and I felt so very much. At ten o’clock each day, she would set out for long drives, with the highway a destination unto itself.
The novel starts with Maria’s narration, “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” It is unclear if she is afraid to ask, if she already knows the answer, or if she doesn’t care. If it were not for this uncertainty about evil and the nervous breakdown that an abortion prompts in the story, one might assume Maria to be a sociopath. But even in the tumult of an unplanned pregnancy when she casually reports to her husband that she doesn’t know whose baby she’s carrying, she remains ice even in the desert. The story is littered with men attempting to police her emotions while forgiving their own undeveloped ones. She finds them tiresome. I liked this trait of hers then and I like it now, in no small part because I am so hopelessly drawn to such men. Her web of extramarital affairs with moneyed men and high stakes were not situations into which I could easily insert the characters in my own life, but it didn’t stop me from trying. From a very young age, I always wanted to find myself among the thinnest and most unceremoniously sad girls.
I read especially memorable passages aloud to my boyfriend Michael over the course of three days at the beach when I read the book. It was in the hope that his palpable lack of interest in me that summer would dissolve in the face of the precious but melancholy habit of wide-eyed girls reading sad stories out loud. When it did not work, I attempted to adopt the cool, unfeeling demeanor of my protagonist, who had affairs with the same thoughtlessness with which she might make toast, were she ever inclined to eat any. But try as I might, I could not beat Michael at ambivalence that summer. And so I retreated deeper into the desert landscape from whence I came to find shelter from his neglect.
I finished the book on July 4, 2011. I remember it because the beach was evacuated to look for a missing man and child. We went home when the evacuation went into its second hour. That night we fought on the way to the fireworks atop East Rock Park in New Haven and I watched the show in tears, standing next to him but not daring to touch him in a gesture of reconciliation. As Michael drove us down through winding roads out of the darkened woods of the park, a voice on the radio announced that earlier in the day, a man had tried to walk across the sandbar that stretched from the beach at Silver Sands to Charles Island but was swept away by a wave and drowned. The nine-year-old boy who was with him was rescued, thanks to the combined efforts of a lifeguard and a jet skier. The man who died was named Rocco. He was thirty-four years old.
I would learn at the end of the summer, just two days before signing a new lease with Michael, that he had spent the summer relapsed on a variety of opiates. We had met the year before when he was two weeks out of rehab, which was two more weeks of sobriety than I had. From the vantage point of a single day clean, his two weeks might as well have been a lifetime. It took another year and a half for things to end between us but not because of anything nearly so sexy as opiate dependence. It was the far more ordinary crisis of an apartment we were planning to rent falling through at the last minute due to credit issues Michael accrued while on heroin before he met me. All of our issues subsequently collapsed into the vacant space to which we now could not relocate. I moved out on my own and lost weight as an act of aggression. I still wonder if he ever realized that in addition to all of the heavy emotional lifting I did in that time and in all of our time together, I permanently dedicated thirty pounds of myself to him. Thanks to the breakup, I saw my lifelong goal of achieving worry-inducing thinness in a matter of months. Maria and I were getting closer.