Book Review: The World According to Joan Didion, by Evelyn McDonnell (2023)

The World According to Joan Didion, by Evelyn McDonnell, featuring the famous photo of Didion in her Corvette Stingray. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Author Evelyn McDonnell

The World According to Joan Didion, by Evelyn McDonnell, is a study of the much-acclaimed journalist and novelist. The World According to Joan Didion is a difficult book to categorize: it’s not a biography, it’s not a work of literary criticism, and it’s not a memoir of McDonnell’s relationship with Didion’s writing. This loose categorization ultimately hurts the book and prevents it from being an essential work. It’s almost as if the publisher asked Evelyn McDonnell, “Hey, can you write 240 pages about Joan Didion? Great, let’s publish it.” A tighter focus would have helped produce a better book.  

The World According to Joan Didion is organized not chronologically but thematically, which adds to the disjointed sense of the book’s purpose. The chapter titles are all one word long, relating to themes in Didion’s life and work: “Gold,” “Snake,” “Man,” “Girl,” “Hotel,” and so on. There really should have been a chapter about the Santa Ana winds, a continuing obsession of Didion’s. The titles don’t really give you much of a sense of what the chapters are about. Why the generic “Man” and “Girl” for the chapters about John Gregory Dunne and Quintana Roo Dunne, rather than “Husband” and “Daughter”? And while we’re at it, can we please talk about the name Quintana Roo? Didion and John Gregory Dunne named their adopted daughter after a province in Mexico, which is, at best, unbearably precious, and at worst, culturally appropriative.  

While I have no doubt that McDonnell has a deep knowledge of Didion’s work, the book simply does not dig deep enough into Didion’s work to fully demonstrate her excellence as a writer. McDonnell writes about Didion’s preoccupation with style, but the examples she cites from Didion’s own writings are wafer-thin. The examples are: “dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper,” “cutoff jeans and a denim Levi jacket with metal studs,” and “black silk dress,” which are all pretty basic descriptions. Surely there must be more detailed descriptions of style in Didion’s writings?  

I like Joan Didion’s writing, but I find the whole cultish adoration of Didion as a status symbol of cool a bit annoying. This type of adoration was visible in the 2022 auction of Didion’s estate. Thirteen blank notebooks of Didion’s sold for $11,000. A pair of Celine sunglasses went for $27,000. As McDonnell writes, “the one-day display of materialistic idolatry was hard to watch, even for a Didion fan.” (p.106) Ultimately, this type of fanatical adoration devalues Didion as a writer, and makes her into a status symbol, an avatar of cool and chic sensibility, a commodity—people should be valuing the words she wrote, rather than her sunglasses and her Corvette Stingray.  

Some sloppy editing mistakes occur in The World According to Joan Didion: on the same page, Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Didion is referred to by its correct title, The Last Love Song, and also, inexplicably, as The Last Love Child. (p.81) Later on, it’s noted that Tom Brokaw had a conversation with Didion and Dunne about El Salvador. One the next page of the book, it’s suddenly Dan Rather who talked to Didion and Dunne. So, which 1980’s news anchor was it, really? (p.178-9)  

McDonnell is obviously a great admirer of Didion’s writing, but she also grapples with the complexities and contradictions in Didion’s work and life. She writes: “And yet, despite her influence as a trailblazer, when it comes to being an icon for women, Joan Didion can be deeply problematic.” Didion wrote a vicious takedown of feminism in her 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement.” As McDonnell writes, “the essay was overall a mean-spirited attack on second-wave feminism that revealed more about Didion’s lack of consciousness than the real growing pains of an important and necessary movement for change.” (p.212)  

As I was reading The World According to Joan Didion, I wondered what Didion’s relationship with Tom Wolfe was like. I assume there was mutual respect for each other’s work, as Wolfe included Didion in his collection The New Journalism. But were they actually friends? I don’t know, but I'd be intrigued to learn the answer. There are interesting similarities between the two authors: they both came from backgrounds in journalism before they published books, they excelled at both fiction and journalism, they were both famous for their chic personal style, and they both wrote books about Miami—Didion’s 1987 non-fiction Miami, and Wolfe’s 2012 novel Back to Blood. Stylistically, they were opposites: whereas Wolfe was a maximalist, famous for his liberal use of exclamation points, repeated colons, and onomatopoeia, Didion was a Hemingway-esque minimalist, expressing herself in taut sentences. And while Didion usually inserted herself to some degree or another in her journalism, Wolfe assiduously kept himself out of his journalism.  

I’m not quite sure who I’d recommend The World According to Joan Didion to. If you haven’t read any of Didion’s work, it might be too much, but if you’re a diehard Didion fan, it might be too little. That’s the fundamental problem with the book, it’s not clear what it is supposed to be, and that holds it back from really being an essential work.