Alberta Review: Reading Didion, Reading More
Thoughts on a great essayist's essay and reading's importance to political discourse
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If you’re a writer, you start wanting to write by reading. For me, at least, this wasn’t reading “great” books or “great” writers. No, I started reading the Wishbone series (also why I got a Jack Russell Terrier as a kid) and Star Wars. Honesty, I think that’s ideal–there’s no way I love reading and writing as much as I do now if the right books, and right kinds of books, hadn’t grabbed me at the exact right moment. The good stuff is the fun stuff, and no amount of snobbery makes the fun stuff bad writing.
However, if you’re serious about literature, you have to get to the great stuff eventually, and for the last few years I’ve been making a much more concerted effort to do so. Late last year, I finally got to Joan Didion.
It is ironic that it took me this long to get here. Thirty-five whole years, although I suppose you can’t count the first few where I couldn’t read (fewer than you’d think, though). It’s ironic because I’ve read so much about her as I sought out work to help me hone my own writing style and craft. Of course, her writing is usually the backdrop to what is written about her. Instead, it is her effortless coolness, how she represented a certain kind of California, now lost. In the words of one reviewer from 1979:
“Joan Didion—or rather the reputation of Joan Didion—is a puzzle. Her writing is praised by critics of almost every political hue, by newspapers as different as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, by persons who can agree on scarcely anything else. Her name has become a kind of restful incantation, the invocation of which permits antagonists who are locked in continuous dispute to pause, smile, and say that, of course, she is a splendid writer.”
Less flatteringly, Joseph Epstein, one of my favourite essayists whose opinion I care a great deal about, spoke to the myth as a negative:
“Literary reputation is based on talent, performance, and overall achievement, or so one would have thought. Alas, to think so is often to be mistaken, for much else, sometimes a great deal else, comes into play, elevating some reputations, sinking others.”
I don’t know if the myth is or was true. There will come a time I’ll pick up a biography, no doubt. But what I do know now, after reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is that her prose is flawless, evocative, and inspiring.
Even Epstein called the eponymous essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” Didion “at her best.” Regardless of one of my favourite writer’s thoughts, this collection will stay on my desk forever, a true motivator to, and the perfect example of how, to write non-fiction. But while reading it—and I’m always trying to relate what I’m reading to what’s happening today or, for the purposes of Alberta Review, the province—I couldn’t help but think of one passage about the hippies she details in the essay living in Haight-Ashbury:
“They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb… They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips—their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes.”
This disinclination for independent and introspective thought, the tendency to make any argument or discussion on politics or society about some overarching, generalized concept that is ill-defined or misunderstood by those speaking, is the essence of our modern, hyper-online populism, of both left and right.
I have a lot of fears about the future, from AI to demographic collapse, but one of them is likely a driver of all the others: a decline in reading. According to the Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2024, 45 per cent of Canadians read between one and five books in 2024. This is a lot better than our neighbours to the south, where 40 per cent of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2025, but the worrying trends are among youth in Canada, where readers 18 to 29 are reading less than in previous years. This comports with reports out of universities where students are simply unable to read an entire book (death to TikTok, Instagram reels, and whatever Facebook and YouTube are doing to kill attention spans).
An inability to wrestle deeply with words makes democratic discourse impossible, and reading Didion while our political discourse descends into platitudes, debates over one-word answers, and fact-less support for the ideas that make us feel warm and fuzzy makes one think deeply about it. If “the overarching theme of her work was decline—of our politics, the environment, truth, intellectualism.” In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” she writes that:
“As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.”
As our country faces the debate over our economy (free trade versus a new national policy focused on state capacity and sovereignty) and how to respond to the new world order (itself a misunderstood phrase drenched in the political and partisan) and our province talks about health care, education, and, of course, the benefits of confederation itself, concerns over platitudes taking over our politics is very, well, concerning.
What is always heartwarming about reading great writers and their great works is realizing that nothing is unprecedented. We’ve had these debates, we’ve acted this childishly before, and we’ve come out the other side. That, of course, doesn’t make the journey less anxiety-inducing or less frustrating. But it supplies at least a little cold comfort.
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