Joan Didion, John Updike & Louis Menand

Louis Wain's Schizophrenic Cats

The not schizophrenic, not hallucinatory Didion, receives the shimmering pictures and transmits them as dutifully as she can, she writes to discover “the I inside.”  Here it is again, somebody finding some immutable expression coming out of her, something that cannot be ignored or denied, a part of her she discovers as she writes.



In Why Write by Updike, the theme of the writer as conduit, not source, continues; a "rapturous child drawing" in a "swollen orb of my excitement," not generous, not altruistic, perhaps not anything at all, aspiring to be a pencil.

What begins as a blast against “Eats, shoots and leaves,” and no I’m not going to spend any time consulting the book itself attempting perfect quotation, ends as a confirmation of the theme presented by Didion and Updike, something is coming out of us, something inside is directing the verbiage, the voice, the flow of words, and artists are simply trying to make the words fit the story it can so clearly express if only they could get out of its way,  or let it out.  It is the writer’s responsibility to let it out and it can only be released.


In choosing a single sentence to respond to, I suppose it would be this one by Menand: “Writers labor constantly under the anxiety that this voice, though they have found it a hundred times before, has disappeared forever, and that they will never hear it again.” But actually, and I hope this doesn’t fail the requirements of the assignment, I intend to respond to the theme presented by all three writers.  Which is, in my estimation, there is a “voice” (Menand), the I (Didion), a picture (Updike, and Didion) that is trying to get out of the writer.  Trying to be unleashed, and none of these writers feel wholly responsible for it.  They feel as if it comes from within them but is somehow removed from their identity as a human being.  It is either larger or smaller than them but it is not the same as who they identify to be as a person.  It is a voice, that wants to get out and express itself in the perfect fashion.  It has a point of view, a picture, a message, a thought or a symbol, that exists clearly, perfectly, and the author is just the vessel in which the message is trapped.  The only one who can let it out and the only one who can be responsible for releasing it in the correct way.  A way that as Updike says is like “being a pencil.”

Karen Boiko. 21W.730-2 The Creative Spark. Fall 2004. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

Didion, Joan. "Why I Write" from Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations. Edited by Ellen G. Friedman. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1984, p. 5-10. ISBN: 086538035X. (note: This essay is also frequently anthologized.)

 Updike, John. "Why Write?" from Picked-up Pieces. New York: Knopf, 1975. p. 29-39. ISBN: 9780394498492.

Menand, Louis. "Bad Comma." The New Yorker, June 2004, 102-104.