Joan Didion

Interview, Sept, 1996 by Mark Marvel

As a person, Joan Didion is as elegant and angular as her prose. Inviting me into the apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side that she shares with her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana, Didion's welcome is at once warm and genuine. What her civility and enduring beauty do not betray, however, is a mind that has influenced American writing over the past four decades like few others.

Raised in California's Sacramento Valley, Didion worked at Vogue before her first novel, Run River, was published in 1963. The following year, she married Dunne and moved to Los Angeles. Her reports on the Vietnam War era brought her recognition as one of America's great essayists, alongside contemporaries like Mailer and Vidal, and her second novel, Play It As It Lays (1970), established her as a chronicler of what she once described as "people on the edge." It was followed, in 1977, by A Book of Common Prayer.

Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987) revealed an ongoing fascination with Caribbean culture and the politics of conspiracy - an obsession that drives the plot of her new novel, The Last Thing He Wanted (Knopf). A political thriller set in 1984, at the height of Iran-Contra, Wanted tells the story of Elena McMahon, a Washington Post reporter who agrees to stand in for her father in a gun-smuggling operation to the Contras. Her tale hops between California, Washington, D.C., Florida, Central America, and a fictional Caribbean island, and is pieced together from information taken out of FBI files, newspaper articles, hearings on Iran-Contra, and interviews with the participants. It is an account of a period when the truth often seemed more like fiction. Didion's genius is writing fiction that seems closer to the truth.

MARK MARVEL: Reading your new novel, The Last Thing He Wanted, I just wanted you to take me where you wanted me to go. At the same time, I felt you were also trying to figure it out for yourself.

JOAN DIDION: Yeah, you're right. It was really scary to write because I had no idea how it was going to work out. I didn't know until I finished the story.

MM: There's also an element to the book that feels very researched.

JD: It wasn't so much research on my part. I was just reading an awful lot of really strange, wonderful material as the Iran-Contra story unfolded. I also read a lot from the hearings on the Kennedy assassination and government documents that came out about the war in Vietnam. The Government Printing Office was my godsend there. They put out this fantastic series called Vietnam Studies. The book I liked best was called Base Development in South Vietnam. It told you how to lay down the matting to build your own airstrip. [both laugh] I like stuff like that. And when you're writing a novel about Iran-Contra, knowing things like how to build your own airstrip - well, things start falling together in a useful way.

MM: Are you a crisis junkie? Does it give you an adrenaline rush to imagine these crisis situations your characters are part of?

JD: Yes, yes, yes. I'm not very interested in the day-to-day. You know, those novels where people cross the street talking to each other. They're sometimes very restful to read, but I don't know how anybody writes them.

MM: I don't think any of your characters would read them either.

JD: No, probably not. [laughs] I expect something to happen when they're crossing the street. To me it's hard to imagine that they don't get run over.

MM: By an unmarked car. [both laugh] You've written extensively about Cuba and El Salvador. What's your interest in that part of the world?

JD: I have been attracted to certain places where conspiracy is a constant, where it's the way people operate. In Caribbean politics, for example. And by Caribbean I mean all the countries that border on the Caribbean. I've never written about Cuba per se, just about the Cuban community in Miami. I got interested in Miami in the '60s, after the Kennedy assassination. My husband and I were just about to get married and move to California. Everybody was saying that California would be the wave of the American future, that everything that happened in California would radiate throughout the rest of the country. I did not think this was true. It seemed to me that the country was more likely to be [influenced by] the strip from Miami to the Gulf.

For this book, my interest in El Salvador came from the fact that the United States was down there playing some kind of role nobody seemed to understand. I remember reading the paper one morning, and this staggering stuff was coming out of El Salvador. My husband and I had no idea what the United States was doing there. He and I just decided to go down, and it was much more interesting than I had imagined from reading the Los Angeles Times.

MM: In The Last Thing He Wanted, there's a feeling that the truth doesn't really exist. All of the information, all the facts, are off the record, so that the truth Is never acknowledged.

JD: Have you ever been in the White House Press Briefing Room?