In it she talks about writing in LIFE as a columnist, feeling betrayed because she wanted to be in Saigon covering My Lai and they expected her to write an introductory piece to 'let the readers know who she was.'
"I wrote the colum letting the readers know who I was. It appeared. At the time it seemed an unexceptional enough eight hundred words in the assigned genre, but there was, at the end of the second paragraph, a line so out of sync with the entire LIFE mode of self-presentation that it might as well have suggested abduction by space aliens: "We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce." A week later we happened to be in New York. "Did you know she was writing it," many people asked John, sotto voice.
Did he know I was writing it?
He edited it.
He took Quintana to the Honolulu Zoo so I could rewrite it.
He drove me to the Western Union office in downtown Honolulu so I could file it.
At the Western Union office he wrote REGARDS, DIDION at the end of it. That was what you always put at the end of the cable, he said. Why, I said. Because you do, he said."
I read that piece of hers "In the Islands" quite a while ago. That line had struck me. This excerpt struck me harder. What honesty, transparency. And how brave. And what a man, the obvious sort of man for Joan.
She lives on East 71st street. I want to meet her.
Nin left her husband out. Didion wrote him a tribute.
While Nin had many passionate affairs, it seems Didion found her match. Conclusions on this to be determined.
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