Looking for Joan Didion: Norman Mailer's Opposite
J. Michael Lennon's op-ed appreciation, written days after Joan Didion's death, pairing Didion and Mailer as the polar romantics of 1968 — Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Armies of the Night — and recalling Didion reading from her 1979 review of The Executioner's Song at Mailer's 2008 Carnegie Hall memorial. An about-Mailer piece.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
J. Michael Lennon. “Looking for Joan Didion: Norman Mailer’s Opposite.” Chicago Tribune, 28 December 2021. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2021/12/28/op-ed-looking-for-joan-didion-norman-mailers-opposite/
An op-ed appreciation written five days after Joan Didion‘s death on 23 December 2021. Lennon casts Didion and Mailer as polar romantics who each published a signature book in 1968 — Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Mailer’s The Armies of the Night — both deploying the writer’s own personality as a prism on a nation in turmoil, and both challenging “objective” reportage. He likens the pair to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman (she restrained and sardonic, he operatic and self-involved), notes their shared debt to Hemingway, and recalls his own youthful longing, as a young professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield in the 1970s, to talk one-on-one with the authors who “knocked me out.”
The essay’s centerpiece is the 9 April 2008 Carnegie Hall memorial for Mailer, which Lennon helped organize: Didion, in dark glasses and speaking near a whisper, read excerpts from her celebrated 1979 review of The Executioner’s Song, closing with “I can think of no other writer who risked so much — and brought it home.” Lennon ends with his last contact with Didion — a long query, while writing Norman Mailer: A Double Life, about the never-produced Deer Park screenplay she and John Gregory Dunne had written, answered by a one-word email: “No.”
The full text is held in this project’s working archive at the full-text page; rights are not yet cleared for public display (see that page’s rights-note). The same essay also appeared in The Mailer Review 15.1 (2021), p. 23 — recorded as a reprint in the 2021 bibliography.
Related pages
- 2021-12-28-lennon-looking-for-joan-didion | Joan Didion | J. Michael Lennon | The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History | The Executioner's Song | Norman Mailer: A Double Life | About this project
- The Thalian Adventure (15.1)