The Smallest Woman in the Largest Apartment

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

A million years ago, my brother, a writer who had relocated to Glendale, California, from a rent-controlled apartment on the West Side of Manhattan (yeah, I didn’t get it either) came back to the city to cover an event and somehow found himself invited to a Christmas Party at Joan Didion’s.

“She was gracious and tiny,” he told me later, “and she had the biggest New York City apartment I have ever seen.”

At Hunter College, in the mid ’70s, I took a writing course and, along with Lillian Hellman’s “Pentimento,” Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was the required reading.

My favorite class? By a long shot.

“I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca” and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale.”

That was from “On Self-Respect,” an essay that started, “Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

To read Didion, especially sitting on the IRT Lexington Avenue line to and from school, which was a block away from Venice Pizza, the best in town, was to want to become a writer. To read her to know if her adopted city (and my real one) could propel me to some articulation I didn’t yet have, to wonder, ultimately, if I ever acquired such acumen, whether anyone would find my life readable.

What was piercing about Didion’s work was how close she got us to the portal into which she was already spelunking. Alcatraz Island with its multi-colored nasturtiums, geraniums, sweet grass, blue iris, black-eyed Susans, and the wind and bell buoy moaning was a place, she said, that to like, you had to want to live in a place with a moat; the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson Gang evoked feelings of anger, horror, disgust, the end of something — everything, she concluded, but surprise; the expanse of New York City that never could truly be experienced if you still, as she had, a return ticket home in a drawer in your desk; and how, she realized after her husband died suddenly, the first anniversary of a loved one’s death reminds you there will never again be solace in short-term memory.

Writers are told to write what they know; Didion reminded me to write where I am — literally, physically.

Her writing didn’t just touch me. It was touchable.

For reasons that defy understanding, I often report for a geology magazine and was asked once to do a piece on offshore drilling in California.

Here was my lede:

“California is a place,” Joan Didion wrote, “in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

Hope and fear, gold and rust —in one graph.

The quote never made it into the story as the editors didn’t know who she was.

After my son died, I wrote her a note — “The Year of Magical Thinking” had been out a few years — in which I asked her whether she would give it all back, her writing, her career, her fame, to see that husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, again.

(It was the same question I asked then-Vice President Joe Biden about his dead sons and first wife. A bothersome question now that I think about it.)

I also mentioned in the note that she had met my brother at a Christmas Party and repeated his observation about her relative size compared to her apartment’s.

I never expected to hear from her.

She wrote back.

“Of course I would give it all back, but of course that is impossible. Best to you. P.S. Tell your brother the apartment is not that big.”

Barry Friedman is a satirist in Tulsa, Okla., and a lot of people are saying he is doing some very good work there. He is author of at least four books, including “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me: A Comedian’s Memoir.” See barrysfriedman.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2022

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