Leave it to Joan Didion. In her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” published in 1967, she identified a kind of slippage in our culture, the breakdown of collective narrative. “The center was not holding,” she famously begins, before moving on to details: “casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.” It’s a set of images to which I find myself returning here in the summer of 2022, when the Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade; the findings of a House Select Committee, empaneled to investigate the attack on the Capitol, is regarded by a considerable percentage of the populace as “fake news”; and a series of mass shootings, culminating in the July 4 ambush of an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, have turned our communities and schools, once more, into killing floors.

What we’re seeing is not a matter of disagreement or debate. Rather, it’s an expression of the collapse of society’s public narrative: the fragmentation of the commons, if such a term can still be said to apply. How do we come together in a landscape where fiction is now regarded as fact and fact dismissed as mere opinion?

At one time, we relied—or imagined that we did—on public narratives to uphold the center. The point of America, its measure (so to speak), has been to be progressive: to include more people, to extend more rights. I believed this as firmly as anything I ever believed about this tragic country.

I now believe that we are lost.

What Didion foresaw—“we could no longer overlook the vacuum,” she writes, “no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed”—has become the way we live, manipulated by news that is not news and feeds that amplify ignorance. It’s taken barely 60 years to move from “We shall overcome” to “You will not replace us.” This is how our narrative has unraveled. This is how we have lost our way.

I’m pointing the finger here, yes, I am, at the anti-vaxxers, at the homophobes and anti-trans haters, the election deniers, the traitors who stormed the Capitol. Very fine people on both sides; all lives matter—I, for one, can’t imagine finding common ground with replacement theory supremacists, or, for that matter, advocates of the Big Lie, that the 2020 election was stolen, spread by the former president and his followers. But I’m also wondering about the future of the country, whether there even is one, whether this is a goal we continue to share?

There’s a meme I keep encountering, citing Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this does not appear to be anything Goebbels ever said. Still, let’s stay with it for a moment because it’s also instructive. Certainly, Goebbels could have made such a statement; it aligns with pretty much all he thought. This meme, I should say, is intended as a corrective, a critique of those who have been taken in. At the same time, it also highlights a larger danger: the fact that all of us, given the right circumstances, can be duped.

The same was true in Didion’s era also, when many of the prevailing public narratives were authoritarian and divisive. I think of the quotas faced by Jewish students, among others, at American universities, which extended into the 1960s; the redlining and housing covenants that prevailed across the country; the restriction or outright non-existence of women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights.

Yet in the era of social media—which now comes framed as discourse in its own right—the progress of the last decades feels illusory, if not outright moot. “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” Elon Musk tweeted on March 26, shortly before making a $41.4 billion offer to buy the company. (He’s now headed to court to get out of the deal.) Musk is overstating, of course; less than a quarter of U.S. adults use the platform—or about the number who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

On my feeds, I can see the algorithm working: Trends are tailored to my searches and my predilections, intended to magnify, and encourage, my opinions and beliefs. The public narrative, in other words, has now become a private narrative, self-selected. Nothing is considered or thought through. Rather, it’s a self-fulfilling set of echoes, less conversation than monologue in overlapping snippets of text or images, sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the face of this, I find myself turning away from public narrative. I look for solidarity or consolation in the private narratives of others—literature mostly. Why? Because in books and essays, I find a more fundamental humanity (which is not the same thing as a sense of peace). So many writers have lived through what we’re facing, and worse. Some survived and some did not. But in staring down their circumstances directly, with grace and clarity, they offer a model of how I want to think and to behave.

And so, I look to George Orwell, who admonishes in his essay “Inside the Whale” that for people raised like us, in a country built on rule of law, “such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.” It’s a reminder of the dangers we are facing, a reminder that we need to stay aware. Or I consider Anne Frank, writing from the Achterhuis: “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

When my children were little, I liked to imagine—as the artist Wallace Berman did before me—that one might make revolution a single household at a time. Although I still believe that change begins at home, this, too, cuts both ways. The ecstatic social revolution Didion was critiquing, what did it teach us? That utopia and dystopia are intertwined.

Many days now, I don’t know what to do with this. Many days, it makes me want to retreat. Retreat, however, is just another word for surrender, and surrender comes at far too high a cost. “[W]hat was the point,” James Baldwin asks in The Fire Next Time, “the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved to me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet answered. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too.”

I don’t believe in the judgment trumpet. It’s not an emblem of my faith. But what I do believe in is the question Baldwin raises: How to live responsibly, not only for one’s own future but also that of everybody else. I am not an altruist, and I am filled with anger, but what else can I do?

We do not get to choose the times we live in, only how we respond.

The post When the Public Narrative Fails appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The other students had straight white teeth, more than one week’s worth of clothing, and “pocket money.” All I had was a load of imposter syndrome (though the term had yet to be popularized in the early ’70s), a suitcase of clothes, a box of books, a guitar, and stories; stories about the people I grew up with, and my large extended family in California and Mexico.

My stories about where I lived, or the race riots that marked my time in high school, police storming the students in the quad with batons and tear gas, were met with skepticism by my fellow students. Then, one day, a friend stopped me to say his class had just read Joan Didion’s essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which describes a notorious murder trial that had taken place a few years earlier in San Bernardino County. It described the people of San Bernardino the way I did, he said, “but I never believed you.”

What is it about the printed word that makes a story credible? Why did Didion’s account change me from an unreliable source to a credible narrator?

Since her death, I have been thinking about her impact on me as a writer. Before Didion, no one talked about the part of the world I grew up in. I thought journalism and storytelling took place in big cities, or Europe, or that Americans who got their books published were white men from the East Coast. But that day on campus, there it was: my childhood landscape as described by a woman, between the covers of a real book.

“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and it begins with the country.”

From that first, declarative sentence in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” to its long, lingering description of a bride, the essay held me in its spell. Not necessarily the content, but the incantatory sentences that make the reader complicit in the web of truths and lies she is telling us. At the time, I was just learning about journalism as a cub reporter for the Stanford Daily. I remember taking a journalism class offered by the brilliant Bill Rivers, who took us through a series of exercises that emphasized the use of a few words that count.

It would be another four or five years until a friend at work brought me a well-worn copy of Didion’s essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which included “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.”

This was long before we had online access to information about people. Now I know that although from California, Didion was from an entirely different background than mine, the descendant of white settlers who declined to take the Donner Pass cutoff. Yet she was able to see the place much as I saw it, one where people, even white people, were striving to make good without much to start with, people seeking a way out, a shortcut to prosperity.

For my parents, immigrants from Mexico who had worked hard for their tenuous, lower middle-class position, this shortcut was to conform as much as possible to the prevailing post-World War II American culture, always somewhat foreign to them, even as its institutions were crumbling around them. My parents’ notion of a good life for me was one where I lived under their roof while attending the community college, and then worked as a teacher or nurse until I married a local boy, maybe one of my father’s former students at Franklin Junior High. I would have two children, at least one of them a boy to make up for the fact that I was the third daughter in our family.

This future had filled me with dread, and it pushed me to earn good grades, keep my scholarships, and keep hustling for jobs that would fill the gap between what I had and what I needed. The alternative meant to go home in defeat.

My parents did not understand my restlessness, my need for intellectual and physical stimulation. We drove two-and-a-half days to Mexico each summer to visit with my mother’s sister in Chihuahua, Mexico. Wasn’t that adventure enough?

But with Didion, I found a fellow traveler with a slightly jaundiced eye. For her, the strategy was to point out as many of the pitfalls of the American Dream as possible. Her work walks a fine line between compassion and scorn, and perhaps this is what drew me to her writing—the ability to be critical, yet care enough about detail to make readers understand this dual vision. Teatro Campesino, street theatre, and irony were beginning to seep into the wider culture, and my penchant for sarcasm and irony could find space in my work as a writer. While Didion could describe individuals with devastating accuracy, she maintained a certain distance to which I aspired.

It wasn’t our commonalities as women writers that interested me the most about her; rather it was her descriptions of the land. “Don’t you think people are formed by the landscape they grew up in?” Didion once asked. That first summer after my freshman year at college, my parents demanded that I return to San Bernardino for the summer. Upon arriving, I found that many of my former friends would not speak to me, afraid of being compared to the people in my new life. I applied for job after job in town, which resulted in work as a sales clerk for $1.20 an hour at the locally owned department store, The Harris Company, and a short-lived job with the Sun Telegram trying to pull ticker tape for regional and national stories quickly enough to suit the editors. Everyone in the newsroom except the ticker tape operator was male, including a classmate, the nephew of the editor-in-chief. There was no respite in town for someone who seemed not to belong in the first place. My friend who went off to Harvard came home and worked as a garbage collector that summer, which at least paid well.

But I still found solace there, in the mountains and wild places. For a few years, my parents owned a cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains located just above the smog line. I fantasized about owning it someday, but as with my sister’s ’68 Mustang, I was never offered the chance.

Looking at Didion’s work, and knowing now what I did not know then, that she was a world traveler more accustomed to airports than mountains, I am surprised at how well she understood the power of landscape. She treated it as a character, something I have tried to emulate in my own writing. By tying us to the land, stories give us substance and definition. Her stories brought the western landscape into focus, and while it was often treated as isolating and ominous, those images were a balm to a writer who grew up with that “hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the Eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.” This was language I understood. And I understood that I could use it to make my way in the world. No matter what I write, the first draft often begins with a portrait of that land as a way of grounding myself before I set off into unfamiliar literary territory.

I met Didion once, before her life took a tragic turn, while she was in Seattle on book tour. She was as she described herself, slight verging on invisible. We had to strain to hear her speak from the stage. Like Didion, I am somewhat shy, so I’m sure I mumbled something about how much I admired her work, and she mumbled something back while we both avoided eye contact. It did not matter much exactly what we said. Whoever she was, Joan Didion gave me the courage to speak up, to bear witness, and to tell the story.

The post Joan Didion Helped Me Tell My Own Story appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For one thing, she can sing.

Phoebe Bridgers, a brilliant and versatile 26-year-old musician and songwriter, isn’t just contending for four Grammy awards this March. She is challenging the status of Joan Didion, now 86, as the most nationally respected and quotable of California interpreters.

Such a challenge is long overdue. It’s been 40 years since New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani declared that “California belongs to Joan Didion,” and the British novelist Martin Amis (backhandedly) praised her “almost embarrassingly sharp ear and unblinking eye for the California inanity.” Didion’s accounts of the Golden State, in both novels and essays, still influence American perceptions of our state, even though she moved to New York in 1988, and her work is mostly about a mid-century California that died with Jerry Brown’s first governorship. While Didion may have a new essay anthology out this year, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the most current piece in the collection is from the year 2000.

That’s why the rise of the Didionesque Bridgers, who grew up in Pasadena and lives in Los Angeles, should be welcome.

Bridgers’s challenge comes clothed in homage, not criticism. Bridgers frequently praises Didion’s writing and even her writerly fashion style, and often quotes Didion in media interviews to explain her inspiration for songs about 21st-century California anxieties.

“Didion reminds me of when I’m really dark and the way I think about the world,” Bridgers told the music and culture magazine The Fader. “It’s so hopeless. She just shamelessly goes there.”

Bridgers’ declarations of her Didion love are also, of course, an act of self-promotion. Didion is the rare California figure who managed to be both a mainstream celebrity and a member of the intellectual elite. Bridgers, the sort of rock star who tweets insults even as she wears a Paris Review hat to her New Yorker interview, clearly wants that same mix of mainstream and elite credibility.

But the Bridgers-Didion connection is about more than marketing. Bridgers’s poetic, indelible lyrics manage to match the power and precision of Didion’s famous prose. Take Bridgers’ song, “I Know the End,” which is about driving up the California coast:

Over the coast, everyone’s convinced
It’s a government drone or an alien spaceship
Either way, we’re not alone.
I’ll find a new place to be from

Hearing that last line—a reference to Didion’s memoir of the Golden State she left behind, Where I Was From—made me wonder if California finally had a successor to the Didion throne. So I re-read Didion’s work again, while listening for the first time to Bridgers’ entire discography, which includes two critically acclaimed albums and enough collaborations with other artists to rival Kenny Rogers’ record.

It didn’t take me long to realize the similarities between Bridgers and Didion are uncanny.

Both bring a literary sensibility to pop forms—music and journalism. Bridgers, who has said she tends to “tweak lyrics a million times,” shares Didion’s painstaking method of sweating every single syllable in service of creating unforgettable lines—from “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (Didion) to “I’ve been playing dead my whole life” (Bridgers).

These two California writers both believe in genre-bending, fusing forms and shifting structures. Didion memorably did this in her “new journalism,” in her elliptical novel, Play It as It Lays, and in the unconventional narrated novel, Democracy. Bridgers writes songs that start as ballads and end with heavy metal (or even destroying a guitar, as Saturday Night Live).

“I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting,” Bridgers told Apple Music.

Both are deft at employing language to cut others. Didion used the New York Review of Books to take down Bob Woodward; Bridgers used her song “Motion Sickness” to take down Ryan Adams. Didion called writing “an aggressive, hostile act” and recounted learning, while at Vogue, how to turn words into “weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.” Bridgers has the same skill: “I’m gonna kill you/ If you don’t beat me to it,” she says in one song. In another, she sings of a friend’s mother, “It’s amazing to me/How much you can say/When you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Both write with the intense curiosity of explorers who enjoy observing everyday things at a distance. Didion, in an essay about writing, remarked, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m seeing”—from fear of driving the Carquinez Bridge (in The White Album) to the aftermath of her husband’s death (in The Year of Magical Thinking). Three generations younger, Bridgers, in her hit “Kyoto,” recounts how “I’ve been driving out to the suburbs to park at the Goodwill and stare at the chem trails.” In the title track of her 2020 Grammy-nominated album Punisher, she writes of moving to L.A.’s “Eastside,” Silver Lake, because “I love a good place to hide in plain sight.”

But perhaps what these two brilliant women most share is California itself, and a sensibility that looks at the place through its dreams, its ghosts, and its absence of rationality or reasonableness. Didion’s observation that “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension” is a foundation for Bridgers’s work.

Listen again to “I Know the End,” an “apocalypse song” in which Bridgers sings, “Like a wave that crashed and melted on the shore/Not even the burnouts are out here anymore.” Or check out “Garden Song,” in which she recounts staring at her reflection in a pool at the Huntington Library and declares, “I grew up here, ‘til it all went up in flames.”

That song, she told an interviewer, “is very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too.”

Maybe Bridgers should aim even higher than Didion. Listening to Bridgers while re-reading Didion, as I’ve been doing, the superior talents of the young musician, and the weaknesses of the older author, became clear.

Didion, who focuses on surfaces, rarely gets to the emotional depths that Bridgers plumbs. Didion’s upper-class Sacramento snobbery—in essays decrying the opening of Hearst Castle to the public, and recalling how she didn’t get into Stanford and settled for Berkeley—hasn’t aged well, as even Bridgers, who barely graduated high school, noted in an interview: “It is funny reading Joan Didion. You get so jealous of her lifestyle, though. She’s like, ‘And then I flew from New York and I ate at the country club and went for a nice walk in a beautiful garden.’”

Didion’s lack of empathy for her subjects can be galling—in her newly released collection, there’s an ugly essay about a Gambler’s Anonymous meeting in Gardena where Didion feels so much revulsion at an addict’s search for serenity that she flees the room rather than hear him out. In contrast, Bridgers’s lyrics are rich in empathy, especially for those who, like the musician herself, struggle with depression.

But it is in portraying California that Bridgers has the most room to improve on Didion. The author, relying on personal experience, offered a pessimistic view of a whiter, richer California than the one we live in today. If the rock musician is to avoid the same mistake, she’ll have to reach more outside her own experience, to find the light in the Didionesque darkness, and honor the hard-won gains among all our Chekhovian loss.

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