Had on November 21, 2011 Joan Didion, who died in December one of her rare public appearances. For the release of “Blue Nights”, which deals with the death of her daughter, she was interviewed by a young colleague in front of an audience at the New York Public Library. You can watch the evening on the internet, a fascinating, uncomfortable spectacle. The interviewer is very excited and Didion does nothing to help her. She doesn’t meet her a millimeter, even though the two know each other privately, answers curtly and lets any attempt to establish a common we among women writers on the stage go to waste. And it looks so harmless.
Like a tiny, petite old girl, she sits perfectly straight in front of a microphone that is roughly the same size as her, and moves her arms like windshield wipers, from the center to the side, as if they are pushing something invisible away. This happens again and again, brusquely, as if against the beat, not harmoniously.
It only seems out of control for a moment
Sometimes she smiles, which leads to a loud “Ha!” can increase. Most of the time she is serious. Even when she made her audience laugh with a dry remark. Only for a moment does it seem uncontrolled: when the presenter hinted at the college that Didion’s daughter was attending, Barnard. That seems to interest Didion and amuse them so much that they laugh for a moment got to.
Most noticeable are their eyes. When she rarely looks into the audience, she seems just awakened and still uncomprehending, possibly minimally concerned. In the book “Year of Magical Thinking” she wrote about the gaze of people who have recently lost someone, this vulnerability, the nudity in it. It is “the expression of someone who steps out of the ophthalmologist’s office with dilated pupils into the bright daylight, or of someone who wears glasses and suddenly takes them off. People who have lost someone look naked because they are consider yourself invisible. ” Her husband was eight that night and her daughter six years dead. But she was still amazed.
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