The Day of Magical Thinking

I walked to the bus stop because if I were not going to the bus stop I would be at home not writing. It was close to five o clock. Joan Didion would not begin reading until after seven, but I was going to the bus stop at five o clock because I had to arrive early, to sit in the front row.

Several times on the way to the bus stop I nearly teared up. I did not experience any kind of the mortal grief Joan Didion describes in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she tells of her life after her husband died while their daughter lay in a hospital in a coma. I did not even nearly tear up for imagining Didion’s grief. Mine were rapturous tears. I was going to meet Joan Didion.

I wore a shirt (I'm still wearing it) that said, on the front,

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dirty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

And on the back it said, "Goodbye To All That." These last words are the title of one of Didion's essays, about leaving New York City, and I found them a fitting play on the words on the front, which is the opening paragraph of A Farewell To Arms.

All day I wore these words and some people saw them and they meant nothing and others did not notice the words at all. I did not care because I did not wear the shirt for them. I wore it for Joan Didion.

You see, in the late summer I read (quite accidentally; I was looking for another article in the same issue) Didion's essay in a 1998 New Yorker about Ernest Hemingway, her greatest influence. She singled out this passage, marveled at its rhythm and the symmetry in those four lines. She pointed out specifically the placement of commas in the second and fourth lines.

Didion, like Hemingway, writes with precision I can only hope to match. For example, here is a line by Joan Didion: "The women let the men commit suicide." I have never written a sentence as great as that. I have written many things I agree with more than that, but I have never written so well so plainly.

I must tell you Joan Didion did not write that line either. She spoke it, in 1978, in an interview for The Paris Review, which I read a few minutes ago, after I met Joan Didion. I have not read any of Didion’s books. I have maybe read four or five essays and encountered a number of her quotes in reviews.

For a long time I've wanted to meet a famous author. I've wanted to sit down, to learn about writing, to share my ideas, to become friends.

When I was a child I went to a signing at the University of Washington Book Store, where I met who was then my favorite writer, Brian Jacques. Brian Jacques wrote (and still writes, for all I know) a series of tales in a pseudo-medieval world full of questing and sword-fighting animals: mice, hedgehogs, hares and the sort. After waiting in line I met a bearded Scotsman who rapidly signed my book while I told him my many ideas for carrying the series beyond and before the walls of Redwall Abbey. Some books very similar to what I envisioned came out later, but you must believe they were only the obvious inventions required for expanding the franchise.

I learned then the impersonal and contrived atmosphere of a writer's book signing. The irritating queue. The failure of eye contact. I never went to another signing.

I first heard of Joan Didion in 2003 when her chronicle of growing up in California, Where I Was From, made its way into the popular journals, which all agreed the book was a masterful use of memoir’s form.

It was only recently, prompted by the unlikely Hemingway piece, that I came to excavate Didion's articles and discover her as a great stylist of the 20th Century. I read bits of Magical Thinking when they appeared in reviews this fall. At the time I was myself writing about death and her insights helped catapult me into a new realm of lucidity.

Still, I did not buy the book, though I wanted to and will someday. I value books more than anyone, but even I cannot afford hardcover.

I planned to arrive at five o clock to be sure of a front row seat. I made the shirt with permanent markers yesterday. It took a lot of time. I did not just want Didion to see my shirt. I wanted her to be able to read it.

Despite my going so early, I expected the reading would not draw many people. There was no notice in either of today's newspapers. I searched online this afternoon and found the P-I only noted her appearance once, last Friday. I only knew of it because last week's Stranger highlighted the event with a selection of authors describing how they'd ripped off Didion. When I got to the library the auditorium had not opened yet but already there was a long line. I took my place at the back and read from Houellebecq. Several people asked to read my shirt and wondered what it meant.

I got worried. I don't know how many people waited in front of me but there were surely more than the first row of seats. Surely not all of them cared as I did about meeting Joan Didion. Who of them even knew her favorite passage from Hemingway? Who else could have claimed their opportunity to be near Didion would be like the passing of a torch? Even as my rapturous moment seemed endangered, I choked up several more times while standing on line.

Hundreds of people lined up behind me and I was glad to be where I was. The reading was more than an hour and a half away. I could not keep from noting that if I had arrived when I wanted to, instead of leaving my house then, I might be in prime position. Perhaps it would still work out. Perhaps some of them would opt to sit farther up. I would be close, in any event. Maybe Didion would see my shirt right away and be drawn to it out of curiosity to read it, as the others had. She loved to read, did she not? She would come to me, laughing, disbelieving that it said what she thought it said. She might be grateful for my noting that passage. She might want to hug me.

Here is another example of Didion, taken from the same interview as before: "I was one of those children who tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it. I began with a literary idea of experience, and I still don't know where all the lies are. For example, it may not be true that people who try to fly always burst into flames and fall. That may not be true at all. In fact people do fly, and land safely. But I don't really believe that. I still see Icarus. I don't seem to have a set of physical facts at my disposal, don't seem to understand how things really work. I just have an idea of how they work, which is always trouble."

At last they started allowing people into the theater. As I shuffled in I saw people sitting in the upper seats. There was still a chance. Yes! Seats stayed open all through the first sections. But as I got closer I saw they were taped off, occupied by yellow signs and reservations. I started going up the sides.

But who was kidding? This would not do at all. I went back down in front and started looking for a place. Some seats were unfilled but people draped coats over them as if to save them. I asked about one in the second row. Some old woman in the first started defending the seat she saved. But that’s not the one I asked about and the guy there let me climb up. It was all right. I was very visible. I heard people behind me talking about my shirt.

I took out Houellebecq again but I couldn't read. There were a number of young girls climbing the stairs at the sides and I started to get excited about meeting someone. At least I could be sure the girls there liked literature, maybe. In New York I went to readings and got frustrated none of the audience seemed interested in getting to know each other, as though the common interest in writing was not enough, let alone the shared humanity. Why do people always act like they have nothing to say to one another?

I had a Stranger in my bag. Some of those girls had Strangers too. Did they know it was my story on the front? Of course not. I also realized Chris Clayton might be here. I started scanning for him.

The crowds poured in. The place was filling up. I could not even see the top of the auditorium there were so many people. On the floor below was a podium with a microphone and a table with two microphones and a flower arrangement and another table on which many books were stacked. A woman came to the podium and announced that the fire martial would not allow anyone to sit or stand on the stairs. Since there were too many people, she invited anyone on the stairs to come sit in front on the floor.

What?! I would have sat on the floor if I had known. But now it was too late. It would seem silly to come out of a good seat in the second row to sit on the floor. And anyway those who took the first spaces there found someone sitting immediately in their way a moment later. The women in front of me continued to protect their saved seat, but no one came to join them.

After several more announcements to clear the stairs and even a concession that people could stand at the wings of the floor, they began the preliminaries. Those women finally offered their saved seat to someone sitting on the floor. I threw up my hands, but what can you do? Anyway Didion was coming out.

I stood.

When I went to a Believer event in New York, I tried to start a standing ovation for Q-Tip but no one else stood. The writers and other speakers that evening were all respectable in their own right, but how often do you get to be in the same room as Q-Tip? Same with Joan Didion. But I didn't see anyone else stand.

Didion did not look up. She walked directly to the podium and without saying anything else began reading from her book in an awkward cadence.

She was just an old woman with huge glasses. Her husband died and her daughter died and now she flew around the country reading to massive audiences so her publisher can sell more copies. Joan Didion is very old and I'm sure her grief took its toll as well. In photographs in the New York Times Book Review her arms appeared as narrow as actual q-tips. I could not imagine the woman in those photographs flying around the country, standing and reading. I had been curious to see her frail arms.

But Didion did not take off her coat while she read. In fact, she held her bag on her shoulder the whole time. Eventually she found her rhythm and she sounded like a real person telling her own story, and she was.

Joan Didion did not read long. Afterward she moved to the table with the flowers where a sort of cipher woman read questions off cards culled from the audience. Didion spoke with strength and life. I saw her old woman’s hands struggle to open a bottle of water. She poured a little bit and the glass seemed too heavy for her hand. She answered carefully but did not think hard, stopping midway through a number of points and refusing to conjure anything that did not come immediately to mind, for example she did not try to come up with the books she had read while writing Magical Thinking.

When the cipher woman asked my question she neglected to preface it as I had with a mention of Didion’s article on the Terri Schiavo case, so the question became a banal one about the difference between writing about people you know and writing about news subjects. I had intended to focus on the difficulty of grasping the meanings of life and death with respect to those differences. Most of the other questions were not questions about writing at all. They were only questions about dealing with sadness and death, questions for Didion the woman, the character in Magical Thinking, not Didion the writer, the craftsman.

Then it was all over. We were invited to get in line while Joan Didion signed our books, and especially encouraged to buy the book if we did not have it already. That’s what the table with the books was for. If I still wanted Joan Didion to see the shirt I made for her I had to get in line, but I had nothing for her to sign and I did not want to pay 26 dollars. What was I to do?

I bought a paperback copy of Where I Was From for fourteen dollars. It wasn’t till after I did this I realized I should have had her sign the Houellebecq and saved myself the money. I thought of just leaving, but then my one chance to have Joan Didion hand me the torch would be squandered. And now my purchase sealed it.

In the time I took buying the paperback, the line for the signing became astronomical. I went to its end way out in the library and couldn’t stand it. They were all queued up for nothing more than a silly autograph. Didion wasn’t even looking at the people as she signed. Everyone was told to get in line and they did. Everyone was staring at my shirt. What did it say? Can they have a better look please?

Isn’t that what I wanted? Wasn’t I just trying to grab attention, Didion’s attention, everyone’s attention? I could not be like them, stacked one on top of another for no reason. I had to have Didion recognize me. I felt stupid for all of it and wanted to leave again but there was that book I paid for.

I went to the auditorium again and sat there waiting for the line to wind down. I tried to read Where I Was From but it was boring so I went back to the Houellebecq.

Maybe it would be better this way. I would get to Joan Didion when the line was gone, and she and I could linger, start up a conversation. This way she would have time to appreciate the shirt I made. What had I wanted? I wanted her to ask about my writing. I could show her the Stranger that came out today. She would not like the story but she could understand how the editors destroyed it. She said when the New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt of Magical Thinking the copy editors changed it so much it did not sound like her. She knew about these things. I wanted her to take me in, she had no family anymore and she had plenty of money. She could help my writing, literally patronize me.

I thought of how peculiar it was for such an old woman to have such an intellect. I have had a chance in the last few years to get to know each of my grandmothers as adult women and they have surprised me with their capacity to understand, surprised me with their sharpness. More so than most women I know, not just old women. But Joan Didion… imagine getting to talk to her. Imagine her as your grandma.

When the time came I went to the back of the shortened line. But the staff volunteers who were also waiting for autographs ushered me ahead of them. My moment alone with Joan Didion evaporated like that. There was a woman taking the books and handing them to Didion to sign. She took my Houellebecq.

"No," I said. "That’s not her book."

I should have just let her sign it. It would have been better. "What is it?" the woman asked. "A physics book?"

"No it's a novel. A French novel." Why did I say that? So Didion might overhear and be impressed. Impressed? "A French novel."

"I just wanted to say hello," I said.

"Hello," said Joan Didion. "How are you?"

"I'm good. I guess I'm good. Thanks."

She seemed to be trying to read my shirt. I’m not sure. I was certainly not going to say anything to draw her attention to it. I turned around and grabbed my things and left. I could have said anything. Some appreciation. Anything. I just left. She may have seen that the back said, "Goodbye To All That."

I thought about all this walking to the bus stop. It had not been for Didion at all but only to differentiate myself. The choked up pangs… I felt silly again and again.

At the bus stop there was a girl. She had a nice face, in the conventional way. It was a little too tanned for me and I could see a cakey film of makeup. She stood very stiffly. The two girls in front of me with darker hair seemed better, they moved, were lively.

But when I looked back at the girl I saw her shirt was spread open revealing a pink bra and nice tits. They were just shoved up there like a platter those tits. Were they like that before or had she just opened her shirt for me? She clearly wasn’t trying to hide them, but I stopped looking.

A bus came. It wasn’t mine. It was going to the U District and all those girls got on. I saw the one walking though the bus. I felt maybe I should have tried to speak to her. It was then I realized the feeling I had after Didion was exactly the same as when I notice a girl at a bar and hope she will want to come talk to me, hope that she’ll say something. But I never say anything. And then at the end of the night the bar closes and I go home jilted.

Didion jilted me like that. Or rather I jilted myself.

On the bus home I thought of something else. If I had triumphed tonight like I hoped where would I be now? I might be in Joan Didion’s hotel room, talking about writing and sharing my ideas. I might be fucking the girl from the bus stop. I might be fucking Joan Didion. If I had triumphed in any way at all surely I would not be writing.