Joan Didion: The Art of Nonfiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)
Joan Didion
This interview with Joan Didion took place in her New York apartment in 1996. The year before she'd published the best-seller The Year of Magical Thinking, a meditation on grief; her husband had died in 2003.
On the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction:
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. You have no notes -- or sometimes you do, I have extensive notes for A Book of Common Prayer -- but the notes give you only the background, not the novel itself. In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still therein the texture of the thing.
A tip for analyzing the sentences or style of another writer (here, Hemingway):
I didn't think that I could do them [write those sentences], but I thought that I could learn -- because they felt so natural. I could see how they worked once I started typing them out. That was when I was about fifteen. I would just type those stories. It's a great way to get rhythms into your head.
The favorite book:
Interviewer: Do you do much rereading?
Didion: I often reread Victory, which is maybe my favorite book in the world.
Interview: Conrad? Really? Why?
Didion: The story is told thirdhand. It's not a story the narrator even heard from someone who experienced it. The narrator seems to have heard it from people he runs into around the Malacca Strait. So there's this fantastic distancing of the narrative, except that when you're in the middle of it, it remains very immediate. It's incredibly skillful. I have never started a novel -- I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel -- I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing. In the same way, John and I always prepared for writing a movie by watching The Third Man. It's perfectly told.
Nonfiction and the significance of the everyday:
The nonfiction [of Naipul] had the same effect on me as reading Elizabeth Hardwick--you get the sense that it's possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it's worth doing. That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something. Naipaul is a great person to read before you have to do a piece. And Edmund Wilson, his essays for The American Earthquake. They have that everyday-traveler-in-the-world aspect, which is the opposite of the authoritative tone.
Methods as a reporter:
Share on FacebookI can't ask anything. Once in a while if I'm forced into it I will conduct an interview, but it's usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who's allowed to hang around for a while. It doesn't matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don't trust it. Sometimes you do interview where you get a lot. But you don't get them from public figures.
When I was conducting interviews for the piece on Lakewood, it was essential to do interviews because that was the whole point. But these were not public figures. On the one hand, we were discussing what I was ostensibly there doing a piece about, which was the Spur Posse, a group of local high school boys who had been arrested for various infractions. But on the other hand, we were talking, because it was the first thing on everyone's mind, about the defense industry going downhill, which was what the town was about. That was a case in which I did interviewing and listening.
