Report 20.1: The Green Light
Part 1 of The Madness of Magical Thinking begins in a hotel, with a failing novelist's aspirations, and an upcoming visit to the Didion / Dunne archive.
PART ONE | PART TWO
[BOX 61: FOLDER 1]
However dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”
[BOX 264: FOLDER 6]
I want you to know as you read this precisely who I am, and where I am, and what is on my mind.
[INTERIOR HOTEL ROOM, EARLY MORNING]
The White Album begins much like most of Joan Didion’s writing, with the self at its center and a series of stark, declarative statements. She’s on the brink of divorce, in a room at the Royal Hawaiian in Honolulu. A hotel she returned to often. A hotel where I, too, suffered a fissure in a major relationship.
Maybe that’s where our connection began, alienated, on an island, amid our crumbling connections to other people.
Her marriage survived. I never spoke to my other again.
Today, I’m in a different hotel. The Union Square Hotel in Manhattan, my home for the past seven years. Writers live in hotels. Writers write in New York. I thought if I did both, maybe a novel would come of it. Maybe something great, something that might make me a success, like Joan Didion.
There’s no book. I check out tomorrow.
It’s hard not to view this outcome in the shadow of Joan, especially when her legacy was newly cemented by the New York Public Library’s announcement that it would be making available to the public hundreds of boxes of personal items belonging to Joan and her late husband, John Gregory Dunne. When I heard this news back in February, I put in a request to be there, at the earliest available time, on the first day the archive was set to open. That day is today.
Maybe it’s the sugary Coca-Cola I’m having for breakfast—like Joan Didion would often do—or maybe it’s something bigger, like the city itself giving me one last chance.
Either way, I feel like my luck might be changing. I have an exclusive appointment with a writer who changed everything. Not with a novel, but with a collection of essays that hinged on memoir. And I’ve been in contact with Michael Hainey, the Deputy Editor of Graydon Carter’s AIR MAIL.
So forget the novel. I’m thinking if I can turn this visit to the archive into a short, quippy, and easy to read article—something AIR MAIL readers would love to read—maybe they’ll publish it. And if that happens, how far away could my own White Album be?
[ITALIAN RESTAURANT, LATE EVENING]
I was at Gene’s, in the West Village. A place I frequented because it was a known favorite among writers. That’s where this idea of New York as arbiter of my destiny began. Dinner was over, the place had emptied out, leaving just myself and one other diner, one Michael Hainey.
And what did I do with that fateful meeting and the contact information it produced? I messaged him with a pitch along the lines of:
“Have you ever had the cheese plate at Sardi’s? It’s weird, but infamous!”
The world today seems like it’s drowning in chaos and consequence, and that’s what I followed up with—a notorious appetizer on Broadway. Not surprisingly, there was no response.
The city, however, shrugged off this misstep and tossed another opportunity my way, with an email from the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts confirming my request for an appointment to be among the first, if not the first, to open the Didion and Dunne archive. I quickly course corrected with another message to Hainey:
“Forget cheese and crackers. I’ve got a date with Joan Didion!”
Of course he replied. Who says no to Joan? He said he’d get back to me. Not exactly a green light but certainly that would follow. It had to.
[BOX 17: FOLDER 11]
Linda did not believe that chance was without pattern. Linda operated on what I later recognized as dice theory, and so, during the years I am talking about, did I.
[FRENCH BRASSERIE, LATE NIGHT]
“Don’t you think the line in Theme From New York, ‘It’s up to you, New York, New York’ means it’s the city that decides your fate?” I was sitting at dinner at Bar Six a few days later, contemplating my impending rise through the ranks of the literary world with a friend.
“What? No!?” She laughed uncomfortably from across the table, wondering if I was actually serious. “It’s — up — to — YOU.” She dragged out each word of the famous line like I was delusional.
[EXTERIOR SIDEWALK, LATE NIGHT]
But! Not twenty minutes later, walking up 13th Street after dinner, who should appear out of the darkened, empty street like an apparition? Michael Hainey, in a long, elegant wool coat with a blue and white polka dot scarf tucked under his chin, walking arm in arm with his mother.
We talked about the archive. I reminded him of my appointment.
“I’ll get back to you soon!” He said with enthusiasm as we parted.
“Of course you will!” I called back, full of playful confidence.
“See?” I said to my friend before we went our separate ways. “It’s up to you — NEW YORK.”
But my need to see this as a turn of good fortune didn’t stop there. When the Empire State Building came into view on Fifth Avenue, I began to believe Joan Didion herself might have had a hand in it. That she had plucked a New York-based writer out of obscurity one night at Gene’s to open her archive for the first time and tell her story.
And that writer was me.
END PART ONE
The Green Light belongs to a series of reports on Joan Didion called The Madness of Magical Thinking. Read part two.