Joan Didion asks if there are questions from the audience. Note: audience questions are often indiscernible though at times implicit in Didion’s response or else restated by her.
Asked about the title to the novel, A Book of Common Prayer, Didion asks Lewis MacAdams what he said in the car about Duke Ellington, then offers: “Duke Ellington said that his music was ‘a prayer without hope of deliverance,’ and I think I meant something like that.” She says the novel is not autobiographical, that the Central American location, for example, is made up from disparate specificities and imaginings.
Asked about the adaptation of her novel Play It As It Lays (1970) to the movie (1972, screenplay by Didion and John Gregory Dunne, directed by Frank Perry and starring Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins), she says that, because of the presence of actors, “The movie has so little to do with the book…. It was just different…. Everything was different, even though I wrote the screenplay…. Tuesday Weld saw Play It As It Lays as the story of her own life.” Asked further about their writing together for film, she talks about the making of A Star Is Born (1976) and how the film shifted from the story as conceived and written by her and her co-writer, Dunne.
The conversation returns to the inception and viewpoint of A Book of Common Prayer. “There is no such thing, I’ve come to think, as a truly uninvolved narrator.” Asked who she reads among contemporaries, Didion says there are “so many,” and cites Norman Mailer: “Not the nonfiction, the fiction.” She returns to her sense of the narrator of her novel, citing the book’s last line: “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.” She notes some of what she did and didn’t know of her characters at the start of the writing of the novel.
Asked how her fiction writing is affected by her nonfiction, as regards nonfiction she says: “It’s intractable material that has to be somehow rendered…. Nonfiction forces me into reportorial situations where very often I’m exposed to things that turn up later in fiction.” As example, she notes how “the feeling” for the “San Francisco section” of A Book of Common Prayer came out of her reporting, on the Black Panther Party and on the Student Strike in 1968, “right here” at San Francisco State, and her being “here in ’67 in the Haight.” (Note: Didion’s The White Album, 1979, assembles versions of these writings).
“If you lived a more active life it wouldn’t matter, you wouldn’t have to go out and report.”
Asked about influences on her writing she says “In a way I think the people who influence you the most are the people you read before you’re fifteen.” She notes that her “whole sense of how a sentence should sound” came out of her early reading of Hemingway. She’s asked how long the novel, A Book of Common Prayer, took to write, and talks about the changes of that work.
Asked about a sense of joy in her work she remarks: “I like writing, but I don’t think it’s a lot of fun…. There is a kind of joy that takes over toward the end, but it’s…right on the edge of not being joy. It’s right on the edge of something else.”
Didion leaves the stage, to applause, after stating: “This book seems to me to be full of joy. It’s just not happy, but it does have joy.”