Andrew Ivers continues to guide me when it comes to the delights of the Western Canon. Last week I asked him where I should start with Joan Didion and without hesitation he suggested Slouching towards Bethlehem. I ordered it pronto, and finished it on Friday. As I have facilitated many writing classes over the years, it’s appropriate to share one passage from one of Joan’s essays in that book…
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
—Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook, in Slouching towards Bethlehem, 132-133
