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.  

Book Review: Salvador, by Joan Didion (1983)

The stark cover of Joan Didion's 1983 book Salvador.

Joan Didion, early 1980's.

In 1982, Joan Didion and her husband, novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, went to El Salvador to observe the chaos and disorder during the Salvadoran Civil War. Didion and Dunne traveled around El Salvador for two weeks. The end product of their visit was a series of articles that Didion published in The New York Review of Books, and then expanded for her book Salvador, published in 1983. 

Didion’s fine writing is on display throughout the book. The end of the first paragraph of Salvador gives the reader a preview of what is to follow, as Didion writes that to visit El Salvador is “…to plunge directly into a state in which no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse.” (p.13) 

 The Salvadoran Civil War was a brutal and bloody conflict, and Didion relates the grim details: “The dead and pieces of the dead turn up in El Salvador everywhere, every day, as taken for granted as in a nightmare, or a horror movie.” (p.19) 

Didion interviews several government officials, and at one point she and Dunne and some other journalists attempt to speak to a colonel but return without meeting him. “…nothing came of the day but overheard rumors, indefinite observations, fragments of information that might or might not fit into a pattern we did not perceive.” (p.45) I like that sentence very much, and it seems to be a good summary of the book itself. 

Didion comes to no grand conclusions at the end of Salvador, and it seems the only thing we have learned is that it’s a complicated place and there’s no easy answer for stopping the killing. Indeed, the civil war would continue until 1992. 

Salvador is a short book, just over 100 pages. Does it really need to exist as a stand-alone book rather than a long piece within a larger collection? Probably not. It’s a little unfair to expect anyone to turn out an entire book based on just two weeks of reporting, even if they are an author as talented as Joan Didion. Because of it’s length and the short amount of time Didion spent in the country, Salvador is inevitably going to feel like it’s just skimming the surface. Salvador is still an interesting book, but it’s not an essential one.

Book Review: The Studio, by John Gregory Dunne (1969)

Paperback cover of The Studio, by John Gregory Dunne, 1969. I took this photo because I couldn't find any decent pictures of the cover of the book. On my bookshelf you can see Lana Turner and Natalie Wood making cameos. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor.)

Rex Harrison as Doctor Dolittle, 1967. Dr. Dolittle lost 20th Century Fox a huge amount of money. By all accounts, Rex Harrison was not overly fond of his human co-stars, one can only imagine what he thought about making a movie with so many animals.

John Gregory Dunne’s 1969 book The Studio is a fascinating achievement in writing about the movies. Dunne asked for, and was granted, full access to the Twentieth Century Fox studio for a year. Dunne shows the reader many vignettes, but the main plotline that we follow in The Studio is the publicity campaign for Doctor Dolittle, the 1967 musical starring Rex Harrison as the doctor who can talk to the animals. Fox was hoping that Dolittle would follow the path of the studio’s earlier musical success, The Sound of Music. Unfortunately for Fox, Dolittle flopped, grossing just $9 million, which was half of its swollen $18 million budget. ($18 million in 1967 dollars is about $130 million in 2015 dollars.) 

Throughout The Studio a certain desperation creeps in, as everyone is fervently hoping that Doctor Dolittle will become a huge hit. What they should have spent more time worrying about was whether or not it was a good movie. (It wasn’t.) Fox president Darryl F. Zanuck told Dunne, “We’ve got $50 million tied up in these three musicals, Dolittle, Star!, and Hello, Dolly!, and quite frankly, if we hadn’t made such an enormous success with The Sound of Music, I’d be petrified.” (p.240-1) Zanuck should have been petrified, as all three of those movies lost a lot of money for Fox. 

Where Lilian Ross’ book Picture featured a father and son-like relationship between MGM executives Louis B. Mayer and Dore Schary, The Studio features an actual father and son relationship between Darryl F. Zanuck, president of Fox, and Richard D. Zanuck, executive vice president of Fox. Darryl had been ousted as president of Fox in 1956, and then returned in 1962 to save the studio, as it was sinking under the massive cost overruns on Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The Sound of Music had made Fox flush once again, but the failures of the massive musicals that followed in its wake led to Darryl firing Richard in 1970. The next year Darryl Zanuck was fired by the Fox board of directors, thus ending the career of the last of the great movie moguls. Richard Zanuck went on to a very successful career as an independent producer, producing huge hits like The Sting, Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy, and eventually entering into a very successful partnership with director Tim Burton. 

The Studio features cameos from stars like Tony Curtis, Julie Andrews, Charlton Heston, and Gene Kelly, but Dunne doesn’t dish any dirt on them. Dunne doesn’t really get close enough to any of the stars to get a sense of their personalities. Although I did learn that Gene Kelly wore a toupee, which really surprised me. Of course, it took me a long time to figure out that Liberace wore a toupee too, so I guess I’m easily fooled. 

Dunne’s book owes a debt to Lillian Ross’ 1952 book Picture, and in the 1997 introduction to The Studio Dunne acknowledges her influence, and says that Picture, The Studio, and Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy are the three best books written by outsiders about how Hollywood movies are made. An interesting fact is that Reggie Callow, an assistant director, appears in both Picture and The Studio, as he was the assistant director for The Red Badge of Courage, the making of which is chronicled in Picture, and 1968’s Star! 

In the 1985 foreword to the book, Dunne admits that once he finished The Studio, he didn’t read it for ten years. He didn’t read it in galleys, and he didn’t read it in manuscript form. Because of this, I’m blaming Dunne, and a very lackadaisical proofreading team, for the small errors that should not have made it into the book. Quotation marks open but never close, or they open twice. And, most egregiously of all, on page 185 Minneapolis is referred to as the capital of Minnesota, when the capital is actually Saint Paul. For a Minnesotan and Saint Paul resident such as myself, this counts as heresy. These small errors should have been corrected over the years, as there’s no reason for the 1998 edition of a book that was originally published in 1969 to still be plagued by a sloppy proof job.

But, those quibbles aside, The Studio is an excellent look at the craziness of a major Hollywood studio at a time of great transition in the movies.