Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold Page #2
doing makeup or something like that
but these weren't like that.
They were personal pieces.
I started writing a novel, basically,
when I came to New York.
That was sort of what you... did.
You got out of school,
and now you were gonna write a novel.
So, I'd work all day at Vogue
then I'd come home...
and have dinner or whatever and do this.
I didn't have any
real clear picture of how to do it.
So, I would just do parts of it.
And then I would just pin up
these parts on the walls of my apartment.
I think a total of 11 copies were sold.
First time I saw her in print
which was Run River.
It's not her best novel,
but it was her first, and it was the, uh...
The, uh, story about people we knew.
It was a Sacramento story.
"Here was the story
about my father.
There was about him a sadness so pervasive
that it colored even those moments
when he seemed to be having a good time.
He could be in the middle of a party at
our own house, sitting at the piano,
a bourbon highball always within reach.
The tension he transmitted
would seem so great
that I would have to leave,
run to my room and close the door."
My father was severely depressed.
I didn't realize that at the time.
I thought...
this depressed behavior
was totally normal.
"We went to the movies
three or four afternoons a week.
And it was there that
I first saw John Wayne.
I heard him tell a girl in a picture
he'd build her a house
at the bend in the river
where the cottonwoods grow.
Deep in that part of my heart
where the artificial rain forever falls...
that is still the line I wait to hear.
As it happened, I did not grow up to be
the woman who is the heroine in a Western.
All of the men I have known
have had many virtues
and have taken me to live in
many places I have come to love,
they have never been John Wayne.
They have never taken me to that bend
in the river where the cottonwoods grow."
He's, you know, a protector.
You married a protector.
I did.
Although...
Also... Also a hothead.
- Quick with a gun.
- Yeah.
TIME magazine.
We were sitting in this building,
late at night
with too much to drink.
And, so, there were a lot of
affairs going on.
But people were very quiet about it.
John was a great gossip...
and, uh, always came into my office...
and held up his hand and said,
"This, you will not believe."
I made him a character in a novel
about working at a news magazine.
The beginning of the book had a claimer
instead of a disclaimer. And it said,
"The character of Andy Wolferman is
based on John Gregory Dunne,
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"Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/joan_didion:_the_center_will_not_hold_11330>.
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