Philanthropic Misanthrope

A Fitting Present

“Goddamn,” he said to me as he closed the book. “Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you.”

-Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Recently I read The Year of Magical Thinking. Lately I’ve been on a reading binge with the rule that I have to read as many books by female authors as I read books by male authors. Not that I think that Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, Yiyun Li, Jhumpa Lahiri, Hillary Mantel, Jennifer Egan or Hillary Jordan really give a hot damn about whether or not I read them, but rather, I owe it to myself. I’ve come to a realization that women are - and rightfully so - gaining more and more recognition in our post-gender normative society (or what is now becoming a post-gender normative society). And if you think about it, many of the books growing rapid recognition are either written by women, or are written about women (think Madeleine Hanna in The Marriage Plot, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Patty Berglund in Freedom). 

When I went on this journey through the femme I started with Didion’s Play it as it Lays, which is a fitting start seeing as I’m writing about her The Year of Magical Thinking (and I do recommend both). When I started reading The Year of Magical Thinking, I had to put it down for a couple reasons. The first reason was her apparent heartbreak spoken through inimitable lyricism, which was a direct correlation with the second reason: that I wanted to read something with more excitement and uplifting (a book about a boy committing suicide called The Sense of an Ending?). But after the intermission I was able to pick up and finish Didions emotional tour de force.

With each book I read I try to take away some sort of lesson for my own writing. The fortunate thing about a writer’s memoir is that one is bound to find, without any sort of discretion, a piece to the puzzle of writing well. That piece is written above, without any flourish, and its starts with her late husband taking the Lord’s name in vain. 

Lately I have been working on enigma. Something that beginning writers often struggle with is the art of leaving room for the imagination, or imposing an enigmatic space within the timeline of the story, since all stories are merely portraits of a certain space of time. When I first started writing, I wrote with little style thinking that I could ride bare-back on an engrossing plot line. But my plot lines weren’t engrossing enough. So then I started writing better plot lines and thought, ‘this should be an easy fix.’ But it wasn’t that easy. Writers nowadays are a dime a dozen, maybe even a penny a dozen. To be a writer now, and a writer whom James Franco would tout reading, needs both style and an engrossing plot. This sometimes means that the plot that and author really wants to tell won’t come up in words, but only in actions and the readers’ assumptions.

When John Dunne gave Didion her birthday present, he told her she was a great writer. He said this upon reading her story that had two things at work: 1) a dialogue that partially explained the events of the present and 2) subtle actions that explained the events of the past. Withing the same scene there was an interplay between two stories told simultaneously. 

I’m writing a story now, one that I believe is emotional, has a great plot line and an ubiquitously earnest style. Today I was able to write something that, without comparing myself to Didion, was handled in a style to the likeness of her greatness. So today I wanted to write about my personal achievement as well as paying a dutiful respect to my ambition of reading the texts of women as, not only an endeavor to clear my conscious of being a male in a world littered with inequality, but as a personal triumph that may perpetuate the writings of someone so great as Didion and the birthday present her husband gave her, the last one before he died.