What I Learned From Living With Joan Didion

In the fall of 2013, my days and nights were wonderful and simple. I would wake in the morning to find Joan standing at the table, reading the paper, and as I edged into the kitchen, she would head to the stove to make me a one-egg omelet while I made sure her things were in order for the day. I took in the mail, I handled the bills, I booked her a car if she had a dinner, I sent flowers if a friend had a birthday or a show opening at a gallery. Before I left for class, I would be sure to sit and eat with her.

I learned quickly that Joan did not do small talk—a relief to me, as I am socially anxious to a fault. Instead I learned to say affirming, simple sentences, imperative sentences like, “You stay safe,” or, “You call me if you need me.” I went to class, and after class, I would say to my peers that I could not go for drinks, I could not go to eat, I had to get back to work, though I did not say what work was. I feared to isolate myself further but also took immense pleasure in possessing such a delicious secret. In a crosstown cab on my way back to Joan’s apartment, I would call Sette Mezzo, I would call Marché, I would call Shun Lee or Elio’s, to see what their specials were.

“What sounds good to you,” Joan would say when I would call her to list the options.

Often I did not know what the dishes I was reciting to her were. “John Dory?” I would tentatively offer.

“I think not,” Joan would say, and we’d land on the roast chicken.

We ate on an eighty-year-old’s schedule: dinner at five with wine, a second glass after (“Just a swallow,” Joan would say), and then a cigarette, and then Joan would head to bed. She would ask three or four times if I had what I needed—blankets, pillows, anything else—and then she would hug me and kiss my cheek and shuffle slowly down the long hallway that led from her foyer to her bedroom.

Sometimes I would delay her, ask for her advice before she went off. I was learning then that self-delusion around Joan was impossible—not only impossible, but potentially lethal. I had problems, I was not writing well, my family, my memory, my inability to see beyond myself, or the fact that I lived only superficially and gave all my real love and feeling to my characters. I would take great pains to articulate these issues as clearly as possible, stripped of their half-accurate language. I was not “worried about my writing,” I was “worried about my brain,” for instance.

When I told Joan that a character named Billy Silvers had taken over one of my books, she said, unimpressed, “Well take it back.” If I complained about not knowing how to finish a section, not being able to get an agent, not being able to sleep, Joan would simply listen very carefully and say, finally, “Well, this won’t do,” or, “We’ve got to figure this out,” or, “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.” When she read my books to tell me whether or not they worked, her approval meant enough to beat away a lifetime of existential dread and fear of going unnoticed. It seems to me now one of the greatest gifts of my life that she was willing to make my problems her problems.

Twice during my tenure, we spent time in the hospital. The first time was for fourteen days, and I sat with her through that stay and all day and all night I played her Chopin’s Nocturnes. Later, after she got better and started to reject the newspaper in favor of music, Nocturnes would become a kind of shibboleth between us, a way of bringing up the wall around us, a way of confirming that we weren’t there yet, it hadn’t come for her quite yet.

When the injury was at its worst—when Joan couldn’t swallow easily because of the neck brace and couldn’t turn her head to see the long yellow and black barges coasting up the East River outside her hospital room window—when things were dire, she said to me, “I’d rather not be than be like this.” I took her to task for the remark because it was my job to, but also because I did not want her to go. Days later, when she was starting to improve and we walked over to the window together so I could show her the view she’d been missing, she put a hand on my neck and apologized.

The second time, she was in the hospital for ten days. Nocturnes again helped but this time there was something lacking—the magic we’d conjured together to survive the first stint was wearing thin by then. We went on doing the crossword together, our routine from before her hospitalization, and still she knew things that I didn’t—asp, for instance, Arafat, Agnew—but the enthusiasm with which she’d once answered the clues was gone. I was concerned. I alerted her crowd, and that evening, a friend visited, a squat woman known to a very small group of us for barking angrily nearly always.

She called on her way to the hospital to ask me what Joan wanted to eat. I asked Joan, who told me she wanted french fries, but when I told the friend what Joan had requested, she spat back icily, “Frankly, I find french fries to be uncivilized.” She instead brought a whole cantaloupe and premium prosciutto from a downtown butcher. When I told her that I had no knife and so no way of cutting up the cantaloupe—not to mention the difficulty of swallowing prosciutto in a neck brace—I was scolded. I broke six plastic knives from the hospital cafeteria on the cantaloupe, before finally sneaking a pair of shears from the nurses’ station and using them to cut into it. I recounted all this to Joan later that night, after the friend had left, and she laughed, genuinely laughed, restored to her pre-hospital self for a moment, but no longer, before receding.

We loved the same poets—Auden, always Auden—but differed with prose. Joan loved Hemingway, and I loathed him; I worshipped Woolf, and Joan loathed her. During the second hospitalization, sensing (stupidly—for Joan was tougher than all of us imagined, tougher than all of us combined, I was in the process then of learning) that time might be short and determined that she should share my opinion, I procured a copy of Mrs Dalloway and began to read it to her. By day three, she was asking for more—and so I am writing this here simply to get it on the record: at the age of eighty, frail and hurting in a hospital bed, Joan changed her mind about Virginia Woolf.

Though I never learned to write from Joan, much as I wish I had, I did learn some things about persisting in reassessment, about having the courage to keep the void of uncertainty at the center of one’s gaze. Joan didn’t die either of these times, in fact, she lived another seven years, but alone with her assistant in a hospital room at the age of eighty, it was as good a time as any to reconsider Virginia Woolf.

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From The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion by Cory Leadbeater. Copyright © 2024 by Cory Leadbeater. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.