Flanagan, Didion and the G-word (and the F-word)

Caitlin Flanagan puts forth several legitimate criticisms of the work of Joan Didion in her latest Atlantic article, yet for a takedown, it's surprisingly sentimental. Dismantling her argument, though, is as easy as pulling the chord on a parachute thanks to a personal digression that not only goes on far too long but also conveniently reveals her underminer's agenda.

The heart of "The Autumn of Joan Didion" is a painfully detailed description of the time Flanagan actually met Didion when the latter was already two books into her career, and the former was the teenage daughter of a UC-Berkeley professor (one imagines her as the Alex P. Keaton of the house, or whatever the '60s equivalent would be) prompted to make small talk with a stranger. Didion doesn't say much, and despite parental prompting young Caitlin didn't really take a shine to her. Years later, she picks up SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM and is transformed.

Why does Flanagan dwell on this as a starting point to her own Didion experience? By her own admission she and the author swapped few words and began neither a kind of great mentorship nor a bitter feud. This is how Flanagan shows us how, despite the works of art that followed, her opinion hardened against the writer at fourteen and no book, let alone THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING or BLUE NIGHTS, could change it. And somehow, that girl's opinion has enough merit for her to chase down the Didion legacy with a butterfly net and try to preserve it by killing it in flight.

At the core of Flanagan's argument that Didion is overrated and irrationally defended is this concept that fans of Joan Didion are attracted to her as a symbol of eternal girlhood, fragile, in need of protection -- a particularly female attraction. (That the author appeals to women in somewhat greater proportions than men, I will accept, although maybe not to the degree that is described here.) This view is based on her own admitted admiration of Didion's work, and the author must be given some credit for throwing in her lot with the fans she later turns on -- but only a smidge, because the way she goes about it is petty in the short game and nonsensically sexist in the long game. If that long-ago dinner guest had gently nurtured young Caitlin's literary bent, would we-- actually, I don't care, and neither should you.

Flanagan has been flying this protectionist flag over teenage girls, including reaching back into the past for her younger self, for several years, and her new book GIRL LAND (which I haven't had opportunity to read yet) elaborates on this theme. There are a lot of forces these "girls" need to be protected from, but it is understood that the "code of feminism" and the desires of men are among them as I alluded to two days ago. Being a girl means being "someone’s star student and someone else’s star daughter," not someone in yourself; to give up one's agency in favor of the cushiness of belonging. As to which parts of Joan Didion correlate to this behavior, Flanagan cites the author's preoccupation with interior decoration and fashion, and to a series of vacations she took at significant junctures in her marriage that may have offered her solace. Ladies love travel and clothes, am I right?! It is at once something to be desired and something to be feared, but if you can't be one, you seem to owe it to others to help them be one.

In "The Autumn of Joan Didion" Flanagan views Didion fandom (as it were) as a means for grown women to express that they still want to be part of that protected class of girls, but even the way she designates that is problematic: Of what does Flanagan's description of "the eternal-girl impulse" remind us, with its "desire to retreat to our room, to close the door," than Virginia Woolf, who would have bristled at the idea that she needs to be protected? Conflating the desire for solitude and introspection with an essential immaturity, Flanagan infers that only women acting in the spheres she finds appropriate -- implied, full participation in wifehood and motherhood -- are truly self-actualized, and that any woman who wants something different (like, oh, a job at Vogue, a New York apartment and a celebrated book of nonfiction work) is shying away from her real destiny.

Her indictment of Didion as a bad mother comes as a surprise mostly in how clichéd it is; is this not the first line of attack against any public woman? Maybe second to what she looks like and whether the viewer considers her attractive! No worries, Flanagan has covered that too, snubbing Didion for wearing an inappropriate Chanel suit to her parents' dinner party. (This is the only place, ever, where the word "inappropriate" will be used to modify "Chanel suit.")

This liberal usage of the g-word reminds me of a public-service ad my mom had framed in her home office for years, whose full text I am posting here because it took me long enough to dig it up (source: United Technologies): 

Wouldn't 1980 be a great year to take one giant step forward for womankind and get rid of "the girl"?
Your attorney says, "If I'm not here just leave it with the girl."
The purchasing agent says, "Drop off your bid with the girl."
A manager says, "My girl will get back to your girl."

What girl?
Do they mean Miss Rose?
Do they mean Ms. Torres?
Do they mean Mrs. McCullough?
Do they mean Joy Jackson?

"The girl" is certainly a woman when she's out of her teens.
Like you, she has a name. Use it.

The reclamation of the word "girls," if it happens, is still a long way off, despite 2011's gift of "girls (who run the world," but striving to avoid the G-word becomes in itself a feminist act. (Well, also, the dodge of using the collegiate "dude" for people of all genders can only function for so long.) I didn't understand that the first, oh, hundred times I saw this ad, hanging in the office where my mom took her consulting projects home, later prepped for the classes she taught; where, when she stopped working outside of the home, she assembled the family Christmas letter and planned our (Girl) Scout meetings; and where she now, having returned to work, transcribes interviews and takes conference calls.

Nowhere does Flanagan underline this treasured image of the protected G-word so much as in, at the end of her tortured introduction featuring a number of other New York critics (none of whom she courteously describes as "girls"), she makes the claim that what Joan Didion is to girls, Hunter S. Thompson is to boys: "He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair." Not particularly wanting to drag the good Doctor into it, I am still repelled by the expressed polarity, the same kind that says "Sorry, my magazine doesn't care about diversity and I didn't take the TIME to correct it," or more nastily writes in to review outlets and says "Why are you covering this book that is by a woman and has a pair of shoes on the cover?" The kind that is all too ready to take any opportunity, when a woman encourages the pigeonholing of other female writers, to shove all of them into that pigeonhole and say "Be thankful you have shelter at all, why, back in the twenties..."

If girls should be protected from anything, it's from role models like this who teach women writers -- well, all writers, really -- that sniping at manners (“She never took her purse off her lap!”) and armchair diagnosis ("profound—crippling—social-anxiety disorder") carry the same weight as literary criticism. That laments that a woman can get old and write about being old, instead of endlessly re-treading the past. She can sharpen the claws as much as she wants on Didion, who seems aloof to the jabs of mere mortals these days, but it's a curious thing to argue that all teenage girls need to be protected against their lapses in judgment, except yourself at fourteen.

To dislike Didion based on her writing, to say that she has leaned too much on pat phrases and that her "schtick got old" late in her career is one thing, but Flanagan is so knotted up in protecting all the girls (and all the women who would be girls) she just needed to make it personal, to apply the attitude she developed as a fourteen-year-old (in other words, legitimately a girl) to a woman with a storied career and to accuse her of dragging the world back into adolescence. To do so serves the masters who would separate literature by and about women from Great Literature, who don't care about the Bechdel test, who would indeed argue (as Flanagan comes perilously close, on the side of an either/or) that Didion is a narcissist just for writing a memoir at all. This, of course, from a memoirist herself, always attacking from the inside.