Joan Didion: the writer who can capture America like no one else - View Woman - Interview

Interview, Nov, 2001 by Amy Spindler

Thirteen years after covering her first presidential election campaign, Joan Didion has published her definitive collection of political essays (Political Fictions, Knopf) inspired by her experiences "on the bus." Even from this distance, and even after the Gore/Bush debacle, her observations have that cool sting we're accustomed to getting from her, alcohol on a paper cut. And, like alcohol on a paper cut, the sting might lead to a healthier healing. It is Didion's cool perspective on hot issues that has made her work some of the most powerful writing of our time. This interview, done a few weeks before the World Trade Center disaster, discusses the issues laid out in Didion's book, politics in a more innocent time--even if those politics felt, post-election, anything but innocent.

AMY SPINDLER: So, Ingrid [Sischy] called me to do this because she knows you're my very favorite writer and, also, I became a journalist because of you and Bob Woodward [who with fellow reporter Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story in the Washington Post in 1972, and later authored, with Bernstein, All the President's Men and The Final Days], which is very ironic considering your Bob Woodward chapter in Political Fictions. I was so fascinated by that chapter because I was a Watergate baby. I was a kid when all that was going on. A lot of what you're talking about in the book--the media being so celebrity-hungry and people getting into journalism to become famous--I think started with Woodward and Bernstein.

JOAN DIDION: It did. The investigative reporter became a glamorous persona, which it hadn't been before. Nobody had thought of it for a while because there was no such thing as investigative reporting during that whole period.

AS: And what other reporter could be played by Robert Redford [as he was in the 1976 film version of All the President's Men]?

JD: Woodward's a very, very thorough reporter, but he's maybe overly reverent about what people tell him. He doesn't seem to feel that he has the right as a reporter to question what they tell him, or to put it together with something they said yesterday which was something opposite. It's in his whole approach, too. I know Carl [Bernstein] very well, and Woodward was probably the one who worked the hardest on Watergate. I think that Carl probably had a more instinctive feel for putting the story together, without having to go find evidence that he needed but didn't have to make that inductive leap. Woodward [was the one] who'd go and find the evidence.

AS: Has Woodward's celebrity destroyed his journalism? You've written about being invisible as a journalist.

JD: To some extent. Imagine you're an assistant secretary or whatever: What would it mean if Woodward came to your office to interview you?

AS: But today there are so few invisible journalists. In the preface to your book Slouching Towards Bethlehem [1968] you wrote, "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does."

JD: A lot of people later thought I meant that I went in [to interviews] with bad intentions. I just mean that the way you are going to come into a room and represent somebody is not necessarily the way they see themselves when they look in a mirror. It's maybe not the way that they would want to see themselves. I mean, you're going to see them differently, obviously. It's just the nature of being alive.

AS: But a life unexamined is a completely nostalgic concept now, with all these reality TV shows. What you're describing here is something that almost doesn't exist anymore. I love the beginning of your new book, when you talk about being assigned to cover the [1988 presidential] elections, and you kept saying, "Oh, I just don't know."

JD: Again, I was the least obtrusive person in the situation, because I was not trying to get the seat next to the candidate. I didn't actually want the seat next to the candidate. I just wanted to go through the experience, and so it was a weird kind of dreamlike experience.

AS: Why were you so hesitant to jump in?

JD: I temperamentally hold back on everything. Also, I'd read the stuff in the papers and I couldn't even work up any interest in the candidates. I don't remember who the early candidates were that year, but I would read that one dropped out and there would be this little flicker of relief: "That's one I don't have to deal with." [laughs]

AS: I love how you dissect that whole need for the story line, the need for the arc, the need for the horse race, because I always blame that need on why Bush was able to even be a contender in the election. In the beginning it seemed obvious he wasn't going to win.

JD: Yeah, it [the race] was created.

AS: You describe the sort of Sisyphean way that with each election, you can take the whole thing and transfer the story onto the next election. It's almost like the Hollywood remake of the next election.