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As the book world counted down the days to the release of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, our lone galley — that slim white galley — passed from editor to editor like the opposite of a hot potato. Who had the galley? Who was on first? Turned out it was Matthew. Then Laurie. Late one night, Laurie Winer drove by my apartment, tossed the book under my gate, and texted me that “It” had landed.
Long before then, when news of Blue Nights first hit, we had decided we’d do “Five Days of Didion,” a first for LARB. This was risky for the same reason it was necessary — for, among the reading and writing public, there exists a great Didion polarization.
I knew at once who I would ask: I’d recently led a workshop in which students were to note the difference between Didion’s dry wit and that of another LA essayist, Meghan Daum’s. Where did Daum stand, I’d wondered, on the writer of “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”? During our back-and-forth I told Meghan about teaching “If I Had a Stammer,” her essay on that feigned verbal tic of the public radio intellectual. She called the choice “a deep cut,” but to me it’s a hit, a standard.
When I read, in her review for us, that Meghan had begun by emulating Didion, that she was once all tarmacs and cigarettes, I was even more grateful for Meghan’s signature wit — and for the chance, of course, to see first-hand how she does it.
(Note to future contributors: insist on adding a word “just for cadence” and win this editor’s heart.)
I don’t recall how this piece came about, and I’m betting that will be okay with Casey Walker. I just remember liking the sound of the book, and that one of our tried-and-true wanted to cover it. Casey is one of these reviewer’s reviewers, and you will find herein some of the evidence.
One thing, though: The day “An Invitation to Forgetting” ran, an astute reader pointed out a geographical error in the opening line. Was it intentional — a kind of “what’s-up” nod to the fallibility of memory? We forgot to ask. And so remains what we all agree is quite the endearing erratum.
Photograph by Julie Cline
“Muddy Waters and Mozart” is by far my most treasured “get,” a piece I’d been after since the LA Review of Books was but a twinkle in Tom Lutz’s eye.
Aretha Sills. I’d seen her around — I was leaving grad school, she was just in — and I knew two things about her: that she was a fiction writer and, as near as I could tell, she only ever wore clogs. That footwear either meant membership in some kind of cult, or a love for Country and Western.
I accosted her in the parking lot. Had she ever heard of Lefty Frizzell? Had she ever. But did I like Merle Haggard? Yessiree. Okay, but — and this was my trump card — what about Townes?
She had interviewed him.
Last December, the day the interview-within-an-essay arrived, I began reading in my kitchen, distractedly opening a bottle of wine — until it was clear that I should not be standing. I removed to a chair in the living room where, still on page one, I thought, “I had better lie down.”
Here is Aretha’s honest, from-the-gut tribute to Townes Van Zandt.
Julie Cline is the Senior Nonfiction Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
