Joan Didion: The Last Interview

If, like me, you spend a lot of time loitering in bookstores because you have no better place to be and no faith in your ability to motivate yourself to find somewhere, then you too will probably have previously seen that hideously designed series of books, The Last Interview.

You must know the ones I mean: a shit cartoonish drawing of the subject on the cover, presumably to save the cost of paying a photographer/image library for a picture, and (presumably due to historic cost cutting when the series first began and then continuing the layout for consistency) graphic design/layout that feels almost confrontational in its amateurishness…

A title and a concept, too, that is morbid (especially in the rapidity with which a new edition is released whenever a literary figure dies), and internal kerning and spacing that feels like the whole text was made to be read on Microsoft Word rather than in a printed book.

Yes, I’d never read one before, and I only acquired this one because I entered a bookshop with my inhibitions lowered and because I’m woefully close – far closer than I’d like to be – woefully close to having read all of Joan Didion’s books so wanted a little buffer.

I haven’t read any other books in this series of interview compilations, so I don’t know if they’re all structured in the same way as this one, which is bluntly chronological, leaving swaaaaaathes of time between interviews, permitting repetition not only of image but of anecdote, and focuses far more on Didion’s later work than on her earlier pieces.

Didion is a rare example of a writer who maintained their fame and relevance throughout their career in spite of developing/changing as a writer. Her novels – which, especially the bigger, more postmodern ones, I loved – are treated here (by structure rather than content, I suppose) as the mere juvenilia of the mature writer who produced The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.

This, I suppose, then, speaks to this book and this series as a whole – it is mainstream, it is mass market, it is for people who know Joan Didion mainly as a sad old lady who wrote about grief, rather than as a bitchy, acerbic small-c conservative who probably would have hated you, utterly hated you, whoever you were, unless you were literally a competent workman as hot as Harrison Ford, in which case she would have tolerated having you around.

It’s fitting, then, I suppose, that the collection ends with Didion’s infamous mid-COVID interview with Time, where once again she – after tens of pages of (a hundred pages of?) a compassionate, empathetic, elder literary statesperson Joan Didion owning and accepting a position of totemic emotional and intellectual seniority – returns to the lavish contempt of her early career.

You can tell she fucking hated the interviewer, much as you could tell at the start of the book that she felt the same.

It is both an emotionally flat yet narratively satisfying ending; the care for her reader is gone, little remains but the blunt, cruelty-adjacent, bi-coastal elite, which is perhaps how Didion was most herself.

I love the writing of Joan Didion, and though her thoughts and her words here are filtered through interviewers and editors (including latterly important writers such as Hilton Als, Sheila Heti and the (possibly cancelled but maybe not?) Dave Eggers), there is a distinct Didion-ness to the language here.

Yes, Didion would almost certainly have killed, rather than had a book with her name on it published in her lifetime with such atrocious graphic design, and, yes, this poorly produced book does feel like an object made to be discarded, but there is Didion in here, which is always a treat.

If you’re interested in this and haven’t read any/much Didion, then go, fly, sprint, run, and get hold of any [more] of her texts; even the very late books that are just publications of notebooks from a decade or two earlier are very much worthwhile.

Undeniably, one of English language literature’s very very best.