The Poetics of Joan Didion's Journalism

H ISTORIANS, political scientists, sociologists, and communication theorists have written valuable general analyses of the print media, but close analysis of individual journalistic texts has been rare. Shelley Fisher Fishkin has effectively studied the relationship of the journalism and fiction of five earlier American writers; and the New Journalism of the I96os and 70s stimulated discussion of the lengthy factual works of writers like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Truman Capote, precisely because the analysis useful for novels seemed appropriate to these writers' para-fictions.1 But even the books on Joan Didion, including the otherwise useful anthology edited by Ellen Friedman, continue to underrepresent Didion's journalism. Her journalism deserves more detailed study, not merely because it comes from one of our important novelists and essayists, but because-unlike most reporting-it continues to speak with such authority. Most recent discussion of literary journalism has focused on reporters' complex involvement in their own news stories; a related argument over objective presentation and subjective interpretation continues in the popular press. The speaker of Didion's journalism has therefore gained some attention. Her I goes beyond the intentionally neutral voice of the daily newsreporter-it is a created, shifting character who speaks memorably and who sometimes anatomizes her own responses. But the most distinctive feature of Didion's journalism is not her presentation of self but her presentation of objects and events. Didion's reviewers and readers have always been conscious