DAMN, DIDION!

Some years ago I came across a ruthless, brilliantly written text (by a woman). Her problem — simply put — was that women had no business writing…

The irony of the situation notwithstanding, I was furious. I could’ve cared less about the polictical incorrectness, or the sexist premise. Such frustrations never bothered me, as I was quite unapologetic in my own judgements. But this one I took personally, because for one I did not know better, and then of course everything was, indeed, so true, so revealing, it was as if someone had somehow trespassed into that very well-guarded, very dimly lit back alley of the mind, where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions, no white lies.

And there I was, all exposed, on the 5 o’clock news. Of course, I wasn’t. But that is how I felt. And that is what I remember. One phrase I recall vividly: “Women simply cannot let themselves – or rather their obsession with themselves – go, and by doing so, become great writers. Become, in fact, great women.”

Women are special, you see. Their experiences are special. Their suffering is special. Their tears are special. Their opinions are special. Their mothers are special. Their loves are special. Their fathers suck! But even then, they suck in a special way, that no other father has sucked before. Their s*x is extra-special. And you’d be a damn fool to doubt it.

Indeed, I was all that. And I remained all that a while longer. And it was then I lost some interest in becoming a great writer and winning the Nobel, and writing about failed romantic psychopaths and failed greek shipping heiresses from an oyster bar in Cannes.

Needless to say, I hated this woman, because she had taken something from me that night. She had taken away the gentle sleep that I had dreamed in since I was a little girl – that I was good at writing, that I was good at anything at all. And as much as I wanted to be her, think like her, write like her — with her short, penetrating sentences and her masterful self-irony, and her casual vigourosness, and aparrent supremacy above all feminine flaws — I had to make sense of the fact that I simply wasn’t as smart, in the only way I knew how to: I hated her even more. And in my hatred a secret admiration seeded for this woman that didn’t know my name, and I promised to read smarter writers, and look up to smarter women and give up writing until later in life, when I wasn’t so obssesed with myself.

And although many other smart writers since have done much for me — because I am in many ways the product of them — and they have taught me how to speak, how to think, how to endure, how to observe, and how to see myself with brutal honesty, only one has done something incalculable for me. And that is Didion.

What she has done is only for me to get to the bottom of, but I find it quite unfair that women should live and die without ever reading Didion.