Joan Didion was 30 years old in 1964. By then, she had been an editor at Vogue for some time. She had also written a number of pieces, mainly book reviews, for that organ of paleoconservatism, National Review. At the time, those respective institutions were a kind of comfort for the Westerner who had come east to write and make a name for herself. But to seek membership in an institution is death to a writer, particularly one with a penchant for--as the essayist Elizabeth Hardwick has remarked of Didion's fictional work--representing "the fracture and splinter in her characters' comprehension of the world." Didion's questioning intelligence is the outgrowth of experience and belief explored and tested, as opposed to living with blindly accepted precepts about anything. In her works of nonfiction she is especially interested in the moment when the piton of experience digs into her consciousness, fracturing and splintering whatever lies there, revealing what it may between the cracks. "That the time would come [when Didion, her husband and her child might be done away with] I never doubted, at least not in the inaccessible places of the mind where I seemed more and more to be living," writes Didion in her essay "The White Album," published after she had stopped writing for National Review, after she'd stopped working at Vogue, when she was living in Hollywood with her family and nothing made sense and random acts of violence against home and hearth, most spectacularly the 1969 Tate-La Bianca murders, "fulfilled" the paranoia of the time.

Had Didion been inured to her past and not cast her view toward the stony end of failed belief, she would not have become the writer she is, distrustful of the sentiment inherent in all narratives that purport to make sense of those abstractions called politics, or culture, or family history, or identity. Part of Didion's brilliance is her ability--her desire--to question who and what she is or was supposed to be by courting the dramatic uneasiness that arises when this former California girl--middle class, white and raised to assume that life was "whole"--found herself, for instance, in Eldridge Cleaver's sitting room in the late 1960s at a time when life was not whole for the former revolutionary either, since the FBI was looking for any excuse to blow him away along with his fellow Black Panthers.

Didion understands that tension--the engine that drives narrative--is not necessarily fueled by stories that people of her race and class have to tell but by those who, in some cases, may have a problem with her race and class. "'White slut comes into the park looking for the African man,' a black woman could say, her voice loud but still controversial, in the corridor outside the courtroom where, during the summer of 1990, the first three defendants in the Central Park attack...were tried on charges of attempted murder, assault, sodomy, and rape," Didion reports in her 1990 essay, "Sentimental Journeys." She goes on:

"Boyfriend beats the shit out of her, they blame it on our boys," the woman could continue. "How about the roommate, anybody test his semen? No. He's white. They don't do it to each other." Glances could then flicker among those reporters and producers and courtroom sketch artists and photographers and cameramen and techs and summer interns who assembled daily at 111 Centre Street. Cellular phones could be picked up, a show of indifference.... The woman could then raise her voice: "White folk, all of them are devils, even those that haven't been born yet, they are devils. Little demons. I don't understand these devils, I guess they think this is their court."

Imagine what Didion could do with this black heroine in an urban shootout now, in light of the fact that the defendants in the Central Park jogger case were, in fact, not guilty of the crime they were accused of with such vehemence, a crime that raised such ire on both sides of the racial fence. One wonders, too, what the black heroine of this urban shootout would make of Didion's early class identification with those people who, "on the whole, hung out in gas stations," and who, as she wrote in one of her political essays, "were never destined to be...communicants in what we have come to call, when we want to indicate the traditional ways in which power is exchanged and the status quo maintained in the United States, 'the process.'"

Writers look--if they are up for it--to those stories that describe something of the self to the self. Sometimes, one can find the stories that speak to and of one's self in places and among people who bear little if any resemblance to who we are, or are supposed to be. What protects Didion from any accusations that she takes from the marginal what she needs to articulate her feelings of marginalization (in the manner, say, of Naipaul, of whom she is a great admirer) is her distrust of the "encouraging promise of narrative resolution." She does not believe, as Naipaul does, that things, as she has also written, "add up." To enter Eldridge Cleaver's flat, or the studio where the Doors are recording or not recording a song, or to watch Nancy Reagan buffing her governmental sheen in a rose garden, or to make a visit to San Quentin, or to visit El Salvador, or to try to make sense of the history of Miami--all of which Didion has done--with an "idea" of how things will turn out is to not be open to the experience. She understands, as few of her peers do, that writing amounts to the act of thinking and feeling and its subsequent articulation with no pre-arranged plan on how it will turn out, if it turns out at all. It is also observing, listening and resisting the very human temptation to draw conclusions, to wrap things up.

On a number of occasions, Didion has disclosed her fundamental insecurity vis-à-vis intellectualism--a distinctly American fear. In her 1976 piece "Why I Write" she states: "I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word 'intellectual' I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract. In short, I tried to think. I failed."

For American writers of a certain generation, thinking is a distinctly European act. You are not a thinker if you do not get the Hegelian dialectic "right," or do not use Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism as a benchmark for what thinking should look like on the page. Didion's intellectualism--which has deepened with each successive book--is rooted, as she puts it, in "the specific...the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew...the peripheral." To understand Didion's interest in the "peripheral," one must look into her insistence on one's belief, one's thought process, in a world that turns on the axis of fashion, whether political, intellectual or literary.

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