Joan Didion: Narrativist or Nonnarrativist?

Joan Didion (Photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” has always bugged me. I like to think of myself as a realist. I don’t need stories to live by. Just give me the facts. I’m not alone in thinking this way. Galen Strawson, in his “A Fallacy of Our Age” (included in his Things That Bother Me, 2018), says, “The business of living well is, for many, a completely nonnarrative project.” Didion’s line appears to put her squarely in the narrativist camp. But the piece in which the line occurs – her extraordinary essay “The White Album” – seems to enact nonnarrativity. It’s a collection of fragments that “did not fit into any narrative I knew” (Didion). “I had the keys but not the key,” she says, “the key” being the master narrative that knits all her “disparate images” together. But “The White Album” does show Didion searching for that key. Narrativist or nonnarrativist? Zadie Smith, in her recent “Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking” (newyorker.com, December 24, 2021), says that when Didion wrote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she meant it ironically, as an indictment of human delusion. I think Smith is right. “The White Album” ’s brilliantly fractured form supports her point.