Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
Author:Joan Didion [Didion, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00
* * *
â
So went the âbeginningâ of this story I had in mind, this story I believed to be about a woman and a man in New YorkâI use the word âbeginningâ only as shorthand, since nothing so rough and inchoate can be said to have a true beginningâand so went some of the notes I made in an attempt to get down on paper some of the things I wanted in the story. The notes, tellingly, have nothing to do with a woman and a man in New York. The notesâthat silver lying on the dining room table after parties, those bars in the rain where the fire never worked, those figures about when and where the Sacramento River would restâsay simply this: remember. The notes reveal that what I actually had on my mind that year in New Yorkâhad on my mind as opposed to in mindâwas a longing for California, a homesickness, a nostalgia so obsessive that nothing else figured. In order to discover what was on my mind I needed room. I needed room for the rivers and for the rain and for the way the almonds came into blossom around Sacramento, room for irrigation ditches and room for the fear of kiln fires, room in which to play with everything I remembered and did not understand. In the end I wrote not a story about a woman and a man in New York but a novel about the wife of a hop grower on the Sacramento River. The novel was my first and it was called Run River and I did not have it clearly in mind until five years later, when I was finishing it. I suspect that writers of short stories know their own minds rather better than that.
Short stories demand a certain awareness of oneâs own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus. Let me give you an example. One morning in 1975 I found myself aboard the 8:45 a.m. Pan American from Los Angeles to Honolulu. There were, before take-off from Los Angeles, âmechanical difficulties,â and a half-hour delay. During this delay the stewardesses served coffee and orange juice and two children played tag in the aisles and, somewhere behind me, a man began screaming at a woman who seemed to be his wife. I say that the woman seemed to be his wife only because the tone of his invective sounded practiced, although the only words I heard clearly were these: âYou are driving me to murder.â After a moment I was aware of the door to the plane being opened a few rows behind me, and of the man rushing off. There were many Pan American employees rushing on and off then, and considerable confusion. I do not know whether the man reboarded the plane before take-off or whether the woman went on to Honolulu alone, but I thought about it all the way across the Pacific. I thought about it while I was drinking a sherry
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire by J.K. Rowling(2982)
Unfinished: A Memoir by Priyanka Chopra Jonas(2902)
Never by Ken Follett(2840)
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman(2273)
Machine Learning at Scale with H2O by Gregory Keys | David Whiting(2185)
Fairy Tale by Stephen King(2035)
Will by Will Smith(1989)
Rationality by Steven Pinker(1747)
The Storyteller by Dave Grohl(1635)
The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly(1549)
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow(1538)
The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom(1513)
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr(1413)
The Becoming by Nora Roberts(1306)
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson(1301)
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner(1295)
A Short History of War by Jeremy Black(1287)
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry(1285)
New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional by Paul David Tripp(1249)