Has Joan Didion ever shown remorse for neglecting her daughter?

Cover your daughter's white pantied snatch for God's sake.

Smoking around an infant, how ignorant. Why wasn't CPS called in to take the child out of the home?

Child nudity wasn't an issue back then R1.

Oh, the anti-Didion troll is back again with a strange axe to grind.

OP must be about 80 years old. Mention Didion to any millenial and you'll get a blank stare. I bet even most Xers have never heard of her.

Joan Didion was a worse adoptive mother than Joan Crawford. At least Crawford attended to her children, albeit with interludes of rage. Didion neglected them completely.

[quote]Joan's daughter Quintana died of acute pancreatitis in '05 and while she's admitted that her daughter drank excessively, she has yet to acknowledge her daughter as having been an alcoholic.

With Joan Didion as a mother, Quintana would at least have learned not to open a story with a dangler.

It sounds like you're worried you might be turned on by it, r1.

Here and hear:

Alcoholics can't be saved--they have to want to quit. I say this as a person who has battled staying sober for nearly twenty years. As a fully grown adult, I refuse to blame my distant family, my psychologically-abusive mother, my shitty past relationships, nothing of the sort. I am entirely responsible for the fact that I have spent innumerable days over the years waking up in the morning, physically craving booze, and waiting for the liquor store to open. Filling in gaps of boredom. Curing hangovers by drinking more. Sneaking booze on the job. It is a choice, and it is a compulsion, and it is an obsession. I've been in detox several times and I am on the correct medication to deal with my anxiety disorder (a lot of self-medication is due to chemical imbalances in the brain), and in treatment I have met extremely wealthy, content people; homeless men and women; teenagers from good families; working professionals; abused wives and girlfriends; computer and IT nerds....alcoholism can strike anyone, no matter their circumstances. You can't blame mommy or daddy for your drinking. You just can't.

“We all remember what we need to remember.”

The only person Joan ever has seemed to genuinely give two fucks about is Joan. End of.

Joan Didion may have been a shitty mother, but I fail to see how acknowledging that her daughter drank too much is that different from acknowledging that she was an alcoholic. As for the photos, nobody in that era thought it was a big deal to smoke around children or to photograph little kids naked, let alone with their underwear showing,

R12 She's yet to call it what it is though. The word alcoholic or alcoholism was not used once to describe Quintana's situation. It's a disservice to the reader, to Quintana and a subtle glamorization of drinking. It's like calling smoking a "habit" or calling a slap on the ass a compliment. It's wrong.

*not used once in Joansmemoir.

What could motivate you to write this, OP?

It is, indeed, R4, a very strange axe to grind.

She does a bit in the Netflix documentary by Griffin Dunne, "The Center Will Not Hold."

It paints her in a very sympathetic light which started to wear a little bit, given what I knew about her, but was still worthwhile.

She doesn't seem to quite understand what Quintana was basically killed by alcoholism, and honestly, a little denial coupled with the way Quintana died makes that pretty easy.

There's an older but pretty good article about it here.

Amen, R9.

But what about her son, Gideon Didion?

Given the entirety of Didion’s creative output, and it’s lasting cultural value....

If she had to choose between being an artist and being a good parent?

She made the wrong choice.

A lot of these comments are grossly unfair to Joan Didion and any parent/spouse/child of an alcoholic.

Well, DL-ers like to feel superior by maligning others, R21.

[quote] Well, DL-ers like to feel superior by maligning others, [R21].

I get that, but my lord, Joan lost her husband while her daughter was in a coma and then her daughter died on the way home from the funeral. And these DL bitches are carping that she hasn't suffered enough. Fuck that.

She's such an attention whore.

I hear you, R23. DL is not exactly a place where you'll find empathy.

How so, R24?

Life has moved on and NOBODY cares about this whatsoever.

R5 Millennials were born between 1982 and 2002. Didon had a bestselling book in 2005, and did a round of interviews for it. I was in college in the early-2000s and The Year of Magical Thinking was definitely talked about among my peers.

I love telling AA fans that I’m a former alcoholic.

Didion is hardly above judgement as an artist, a mother, a wife, or private individual PRECISELY because she's made all of the above the exclusive subject of her latest work.

She's exploited the deaths of her family members (ruthlessly, I think) for greater fame and glory (if only because no one was reading her tedious political essays or hideous fiction any longer). So why shouldn't we judge her?

"I am Joan Didion. Watch me suffer and watch me write."

Attention whore, indeed.

R30 I think Joan Didion is a beautiful writer and I have found her writings on the tragedies of her life really affecting and helpful for my own life. You don't have to like her work, but many, many people have and will for the foreseeable future.

This is SUCH a DL thread.

Have you read either of the two books Didion wrote about the deaths in her family, R30? If you are going to judge her, judge her work.

R3, it's obvious she isn't naked, but her tidy whitey crotch is on display! Mother should not chance stirring lust in the loins of the pious. They are so easily incited.

^ Mike Pense

Her daughter was "adopted" maybe there wasn't a bond.

I don't judge Joan. I've experienced my own dissatisfaction and disappointment with merchandise I thought I wanted.

While the merchandise could not be returned, it was ultimately disposed of.

Sounds more like carping because Didion wasn't introspective enough to learn anything from all that suffering.

R9, thanks for your story. It's good to hear your point of view.

R5 There was a movie from a couple of years ago called Ingrid Goes West, where liking Joan Didion was used as a badge of cool among its hipster millennial characters.

Didion is namechecked in a lot of young adult fiction (John Green) and works popular with younger generations (Adventure Time, Mountain Goats songs, things like that).

College aged and college educated people will have absolutely heard of her, too.

Is New Journalism dead? I liked the form -- of course one must be a compelling person in order to insert themselves into the narrative.

I loved [italic] Slouching Towards Bethlehem [/italic] and [italic] White Album [/italic]. I could never get into her 1980s stuff.

Regarding Henry had an interesting continuation of the Nancy Reagan she introduced in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. One tale was how Nancy would fall apart and pace around the White House if she found out someone got a magazine issue before she did.

R43 That book is called After Henry. Regarding Henry is a bad Harrison Ford movie.

This bitch gets a shitload of attention.

Am I supposed to have any fucking idea who these people are??

Quintana was troubled at a very young age. She was adopted and I think she suffered tremendous anxiety. John and Joan were more into their own gratification and obsessed with their work to pay much attention. But after reading Blue Nights, I could feel Joan having intense guilt and empathy for “Q”. She was heartbroken.

Imagine all the cigarette ash that fell on that poor girl's face.

Akin to the cum on yours, R48?

R49, Come come. You'll have to be more clever than that.

I thought it was a good one!!!

Love me, damn you!!!

I think high profile, successful authors tend to be self absorbed, narcissistic and unpleasant in general and Didion was no exception. Jonathan Franzen seems like an insufferable, pinched faced douchebag prick. A poster on a different thread said that Joyce Carol Oates was incredibly unpleasant to be around. Another comment described Jonathan Safran Foers wife, the author Nicole Kraus, as a cold and disengaged mother. Didion's husband was also a nasty piece of work.

She named her daughter QUINTANA ROO - the name of a fucking State in Mexico. Who does that to a child?

FUCK YOU R53. What the fuck do you know, cunt!!

Why do famous authors and writers always pose with a pretentious and pouty somber expression? Can't they just smile for the camera like normal people? I get that they probably feel looking serious is more "emotionally truthful " or whatever but I think it makes them look like special snowflakes.

R55 That wasn't Joan's style, you Fool. Smiling in a photograph has not always been deemed appropriate or the norm. No one smiled in photographs in the 1800s, whether it was a personal portrait, a family portrait, and that was the norm well into the 20th century. Personally I prefer the lack of forced expression, it's pretentious TO smile in every goddamn photo that's taken of you.

I did it interesting that no one has mentioned that Joan herself is/was prone to massive anxiety and depression.

She is a very introverted woman in many ways- an observer.

R56 While smiling in photos hasn't always been the norm, it has certainly been the norm for quite some time. There's a happy medium between grinning manically from ear to ear and doing the pretentious somber pout.

And color. Everything has to be in riotous color, and duck pouts are not an improvement on a challenging stare, starkly illustrated in classic black and white.

mind your fucking business OP.

I'd love to have a conversation with Didion. Like R57 said, she's an observer and an original thinker.

I'd like to see some of you bitches take such a fabulous photo

OP is obviously the smoking troll (see photo) trying to branch out. The same moralistic, lugubrious tone. Suspect OP = r48 and just now probably also r62. It's the obsessed smoking troll.

R62 is a classic DL post.

BTW, that house with the white garage door is in Hollywood.

Here is a blog by someone who found the house where the photo was taken. It's on Franklin.

I will read her other stuff, but I could barely make it through Play It As It Lays.

That was a fun article, thanks R65.

You're welcome, R67.

Bump

A strike against the daughter’s happiness might have been that she was adopted.

A lot of adoptees recover from being abandoned by the pair that’s supposed to stick by you no matter what ... but many do not. It can be awful beginning life knowing your own parents sloughed you off.

Jeez.

Having worked in substance abuse counseling, R9 is correct. I hope things continue to improve for you, R9. Keep fighting.

Well someone's got massive unresolved mommy issues!

OP doesn't have a word to say against the father, who also brought Quintana up, or about the links between genetics and alcoholism, which can't be laid at the feet of adoptive parents. No, he blames the mother 100%, and if his own mother's alive she has my deepest sympathy.

I think Joan Didion may have adopted Quintana in order to atone for an abortion she may have had in real life. In Didion's early writing (the novel Play It As It Lays and the screenplay for the film Panic in Needle Park), both female protagonists strongly resemble Joan by being beautiful and sort of guileless and with passive, introverted, melancholic/depressive personalities. Both female characters reluctantly choose abortion -and regret it. Joan isn't religious, so the prospect of being forgiven by God is meaningless. Adoption would be a way to make amends to the bio child you didn't mother.

R73 well she sure fucked that up. R72 I think Griffin was a terrible parent as well.

Omg.

Griffin Dunne? Her cousin?

"My father, my cousin. My father, my cousin"

Joan spoke briefly of her father, but I don't recall her ever mentioning her mother.

Didion attributes her daughter’s alcohol abuse to anxiety and depression. This may not be the most up to date understanding of alcoholism, but it may be easier for Didion to focus on Quintana’s underlying issues than her choice to keep drinking. Very little can be done to help an addict who won’t help herself.