re·port  (rəˈpôrt) verb

1.give a spoken or written account of something that one has observed, heard, done, or investigated.
“the representative reported a decline in milk and meat production”
synonyms: announce, describe, give an account of, detail, outline, communicate, divulge, disclose, reveal, make public, publish, broadcast, proclaim, publicize
“the government reported a fall in inflation”

Dictionaries will tell you that by labeling herself as a reporter, Joan Didion is correct.  She meets the standards because she uses real facts and real events when she describes the way people in the west coast were living and thinking in the 60s.  But just because Didion can technically be defined as a reporter, does that necesarily mean it’s the most accurate way to characterize her writing?  When we think of a report, we tend to think of things that we would normally hope to be unbiased sources of information; thorough analyzations of factual occurrences, provided to us with minimal disclosure.  I’m pretty sure that doesn’t exactly line up with whatever Joan Didion does. Continue reading →

My kneejerk reaction to the statement “writers are always selling someone out” was based within the confines of John Wayne: A Love Song. In such an essay Didion sells herself out first by revealing how she has lived so long in awe of this man, but in the second part of the essay she breaks the cult of personality surrounding him, which would be considered by most to be not doing John Wayne a solid in the presentation of a now ill and cancer stricken Duke. Didion betrays the popular idea of Wayne in simply her humanization of him/added complexity—she doesn’t destroy, buy offers a grounded lens. Didion’s feelings that she is “selling out” by providing her own representation is complex; the selling out does not entail what most of us would consider—like a cheating husband, or not filing taxes—Didion’s selling out is mostly concerned with attention and involving herself in a subject’s life. A need to feel invisible is vital to Didion’s level of ability: ““My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does”—her “advantage” allows her to see how people really are and in turn break preconceived notions of self or public perception.

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In the preface Joan Didion almost describes herself as a deceiving person, and implies that people that she is interviewing occasionally confide in her but she wants to be remembered as a reporter, which often means the person being interviewed is going to be shed in a negative light.Apparently Joan Didion is perpetually selling somebody out. I find this to simply not be the case. Yes, many could argue that she does not reserve judgement in a majority of her essays but there are a few examples which prove this wrong.

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I feel as though Didion, in describing herself in the preface, is in a way preparing the reader for the worst. That’s not to say she doesn’t have faith in her writing abilities (though all writers surely have some doubts), but she’s letting them know what the truth of it is. She says how she uses her small size and her mannerisms to her advantage. It’s as though she’s saying, “here’s what I do. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it either.” She knows that she seems rather non-threatening, and I feel as though she may feel a little guilty about that.

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I find it right for Didion to deny that she is a “camera eye”. To me, she is more like Instagram. In fact, all authors of creative nonfiction are in one way or another photo-editing apps. The camera can fix its lens upon the same scene, yet by adding a filter, adjusting colors and contrast, blurring and sharpening certain parts of the photo, maybe even cropping out some parts…the same original photo suddenly has a ton of different possible outcomes, leading the viewer to interpret the photo in vastly different ways.The writer edits the photo according to what they believe and the message they desire to convey. Literary devices act as the different functions in the application; irony might be Brannan, metaphors might be Mayfair, the hashtags and heightened contrast and saturation may act as more obvious hints to Didion’s main thoughts about her topic of writing…and she shares her view with the world by “posting” it.

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