Where Thoughts Come From, pt. 2
It was inadvertent
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As an essay-writing young woman I, like many others of my ilk, fell hard for one Joan Didion. Heard of her? I spent years obsessively reading anything I could get my hands on, and rapturously scribbling quotes into journals and later, in my notes app. I even once wrote Joan as a character into an essay about arriving in New York. I share this essay with a slight wince; it is absent some self- and cultural-knowledge. But I was in my 20s when I wrote it (23, to be exact), which is an age at which we should all be forced to do manual labor our bodies are still good at and to say nothing much at all. I’m mostly joking.
I still love Joan and moreso, I look fondly upon the version of me I was when I so fully dove into her work. I was leveling up as a person and a writer and a thinker and she was riding sidecar for a great deal of that time, so I’m grateful. (An aside: Picturing a tiny, ancient, fragile Joan Didion in an actual sidecar…a delight). I am also aware of the ways in which her work has failed, most specifically with regard to the Latine communities in California. Here’s a great essay about that.
I can sit with her lesser qualities in part because a thing Joan helped me find is the ways to love and loathe a person, even your hero, at the same time. A gift. And sometimes the person you love/loathe is yourself. The quote of Joan’s I return to time and again is:
“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
For me, screenwriting takes me to a place of deep Id that surfaces those people I used to be and shows them back to me in ways I never knew were possible. It has also, I’ve found, shown me the people I wish not to be. Particularly with IDLE/WILD. I’ll get there, I promise.