Brace yourself. Caitlin Flanagan has an exceedingly perceptive and well-done essay in the Atlantic! Sure, there is a psychologically deep-seated and somewhat deranged whiff of/riff on gender essentialism (boys like Hunter Thompson and girls like Joan Didion!), but hey, that's at least a little true. For one thing, she draws well the obvious connections that Didion and John Gregory Dunne were the most extreme caricatures of their generation of parents (in short: rather terrible), the parents who made their childrens' generation into helicoptering nightmares.
Didion reports that the central demon of Quintana’s life was a fear of abandonment. “How,” she writes plaintively, “could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?” A cursory reading of the Didion-Dunne canon provides a partial answer.... Both of Quintana’s parents worked constantly, left her alone with a variety of sitters—two teenage boys who happened to live next door, a woman who “saw death” in Joan Didion’s aura, whatever hotel sitter was on duty—and they left her alone in Los Angeles many, many times when they were working. The Christmas Quintana was 3, Didion planned to make crèches and pomegranate jelly with her, but then got a picture in New York and decided she’d rather do that, leaving her child home.... Dunne was a brilliant writer and a bully, a prince and an angry guy, a besotted father and a bad drunk who could throw Quintana’s essays out the car window on the way to school if he found out she hadn’t had one of her parents “proof” them. He was the kind of man who kicked down doors during marital quarrels and could have a bad fight with his wife and then blame it on his very young daughter; at one point he left the two of them and moved into a bachelor pad in Vegas for a year and a half. (“How could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?”)
Guys, Pauline Kael "Joan Didion...Ridiculously swank." I've said it before! Many times.
I feel like an R. Kelly fan here, but absentee parenting doesn't sound like the worst trade-off when the return is a profile of John Wayne that's so good that it makes everyone reconsider whether or not they should keep pumping out the ol' word count. Or all that crazy listlessness in "Play it as it Lays." Or, for chrissakes, this?
"I was making only $65 or $70 then a week then (“Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands,” I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by an editor of the magazine for which I worked), so little money that some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat, a fact which went unmentioned in the letters I wrote to California. I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of would matter."
Didn't everyone who reads the Awl move to New York because of those lines? At least, in part?
Also, maybe some children would be better off being raised by people other than their actual parents?
> Didn't everyone
No.
@Jay Kang The parents whose children would be better off being raised by other people have no business being parents.
@Jay Kang I know who R Kelly is, I moved to New York, and I'm a parent. And yet I don't understand this comment at all.
@Clarence Rosario There's a reason NYC always smells like pee
@Clarence Rosario: At the end of the day, any artist will have fans willing to defend their worst behavior, because they think bad shit done to other people is worth the art created.
@Jay Kang
Good lord, man.
No, Clarence Rosario, I don't think you know who R Kelly is.
@skybarn- sorry?
@Jay Kang
I wouldn't fuck up my kid's lives for anything less than Moby Dick
@Jay Kang: So a paragraph is worth a person?
@Jay Kang I think that's a fine question, and I don't know the answer. Just because I wouldn't do it to my kids -- or at least I hope I'm not doing it to my kids -- doesn't mean that I'm not glad that a lot of the art that fucked-up assholes make exists, even if they were fucked-up assholes.
jeez... way to go caitlin. you're so courageous for kicking a little old lady when she's down; after she's lost her gifts, her husband and her daughter. Why do you have to be such a dick? There are some essays that shouldn’t be written out of habit — the habit of writing (the habit of being a know-it-all asshole).
@Bay of Bengal Read the essay. It's ultimately pretty sympathetic.
@Bay of Bengal I'm guessing you're one of those "never speak ill of the dead" people. Regardless of the essay's merits, it's been, what, seven years since the most recent of those deaths? And in those seven years this "little old lady" who's "down" has produced two bestselling books and a play addressing said deaths. I should think the subject is more than fair game.
@Mr. B To be precise, I was irritated by Flanagan's out of her ass certainty that neglectful and insensitive parenting by Didion and Dunne led to Quintana's misery. Seems a bit too definitive for an outsider to deduce. And yeah, the whole thing is tragic and I feel for the lady who lost so much in so short a while. Caitlin's rolling eyes and smug indictment of didion's parenting is mean spirited.
Meanwhile, Caitlin Flanagan's children are constantly trying to go home with their babysitter, and in fact, DREAM of being abandoned.
"...a book with a bright orange-and-yellow cover..." Lord, it really WAS the 1970s wasn't it?
Flanagan writes about Didion's parenting as though Didion herself doesn't see any problem with her parenting. In fact, her self-flagellation is the most intense and unsettling thing about Blue Nights, which for my money is a much more powerful piece of writing than The Year of Magical Thinking.
And the bit about the young Didion's anxious behavior at a dinner party and inappropriate wearing of a Chanel suit says far more about Flanagan and her own mother, it seems to me, than it does about Didion.
@Maud Newton: I'm not sure "seeing a problem with" is the same as "beyond reproach."
@deepomega I'm not saying Didion is beyond reproach, nor do I think Didion herself would argue that she is. Nevertheless, Flanagan's tone and approach rankle me, as they almost always do.
@Maud Newton Yeah, while I definitely don't defend bad parenting, I thought Blue Nights was about Didion taking herself to task for what she might have done differently. That doesn't let Didion off the hook, but it does make that horse Flanagan's kicking look a little bit deader.
@C_Webb Agreed (http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Blue-Nights/ba-p/6099)
@Maud Newton BTW, if anyone's interested, I'm having a lovely conversation in Flanagan's comments section with someone who not only supports the claim that only women like Didion, but also insists that only whites like Toni Morrison (who she admits is "intelligent"). Come join the fun!
Always selling somebody out.
Exceedingly perceptive and well-done indeed. Yet I found that it read a bit like an obituary towards the end. I suppose this is a poetic way to go, but...bummer.
It's not like Dunne was fucking his daughter.
They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.
@MikeBarthel And then you marry someone just like one of them.
@zidaane And then YOU fill them with the faults you had and add some extra, just for THEM.... and people say original sin is nonsensical...
@MikeBarthel Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.
There are any people who like Toni Morrison? But anyway, think of all the asshole, abusive artists in history, and then imagine how much the world would be ... the same ... if their book/picture/whatever had never been created. Creating a work of art is not worth causing one's own child a single second of pain.
I hate Joan Didion. That is all.