Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold Page #3

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though it tends to flatter."

Later, he said,

"Calvin, I was wondering, what's the...?

Why was I Jewish in the book?"

And I said,

"That's the 'tends to flatter, ' John.

You don't want to be a

lace curtain Irish all your life."

As Irish Catholics become assimilated,

they lose something.

They lose their Irish

which makes them, uh, unique.

It's sort of a very sort of

dark, uh, sense of humor that they have.

The Irish sense of humor is

"A man kisses the Blarney Stone

and falls and fractures his skull."

That makes the Irish laugh.

There is that sense of storytelling,

and the Irish are great storytellers.

As Joan's family

crossed the frontier,

John's grandfather came through

Ellis Island at the age of 11

with only a 3rd-grade education.

It was his love of storytelling that John

said influenced him to become a writer.

He'd offer the kids a quarter,

a lot of money at the time...

to recite a Shakespeare sonnet or poem.

John went on to write 13 books,

both fiction and non-fiction.

His older brother

and my father, Dominick Dunne,

also became a journalist and novelist.

I went to Hartford and

fell in love with his family...

and determined that I was

gonna marry him...

and did.

I don't know what "fall in love" means.

Um... It's not part of my...

world.

But I do remember having a very clear

sense that I wanted this to continue.

I liked being a couple.

I liked having somebody there.

I could not have been with

somebody who wasn't a writer

because that person

would not have had patience with me.

In the spring,

after we got married,

Joan and I got fearfully drunk

at this party.

And the next morning,

uh, we had breakfast at a...

On Madison Avenue.

At a coffee shop, a drug store.

And Joan started to cry at breakfast.

And so I had to go to work.

I got into work. I called her.

"Would you mind if I quit?"

And she said, "No."

I said, "We'll figure out

what we're going to do."

And I went in and gave my notice.

End of story. End of time.

It's easy to see the beginnings

of things and harder to see the ends.

I remember now

with a clarity that makes

the nerves on the

back of my neck constrict...

when New York began for me.

But I cannot lay my finger

upon the moment it ended.

All I know is that it was

very bad when I was 28.

Everything that was said to me,

I seemed to have heard before.

And I could no longer listen.

I hurt people I cared about...

and insulted those I did not.

I cried until I was not even

aware when I was crying.

Cried in elevators, and in taxis,

and in Chinese laundries.

That was the year, my 28th, when I began

to understand the lesson in that story...

which was that it is distinctly possible

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