The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty Page A

washcloth over her eyes. The discomfort of her periods heightened the throbbing migraines. In public, she’d try to deny the pain. She’d sit in a classroom with tears on her face. The “pain seemed a shameful secret,” she wrote, “evidence … of all my bad attitudes, my unpleasant tempers.”
    She still loved stage acting but was offered little range in local productions because she was so tiny. At school, and at a small repertory theater downtown, she took children’s roles—including that of Babette in Lillian Hellman’s wartime melodrama, Watch on the Rhine. At one point in the play, a character says, in Babette’s hearing, “The Renaissance Man is a man who wants to know … what made Iago evil?” Didion remembered this reference to Iago and would use it, many years later, to open her second novel, Play It As It Lays.
    Eugene O’Neill was a favorite. “I was struck by the sheer theatricality of his plays. You could see how they worked,” she said. “I read them all one summer. I had nosebleeds, and for some reason it took all summer to get the appointment to get my nose cauterized. So I just lay still on the porch all day and read Eugene O’Neill. That was all I did. And dab at my face with an ice cube.”
    She memorized speeches from The Member of the Wedding and Death of a Salesman . She tackled Moby-Dick but “missed that wild control of language. What I had thought were discursive [passages] were really these great leaps. The book had just seemed a jumble; I didn’t get the control in it.” On the other hand, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy knocked her out. She locked herself in her room one weekend and read it to the end. She was amazed to learn that a story’s accumulating power did not always grow from a spectacular style. Suspense was a necessity. And Henry James’s sentences, so intricate and complex, nearly paralyzed her. “[He] made me afraid to put words down,” she said. One of the “discouraging things is that every word you put down limits the possibilities of what you have in your mind. [James] somehow got all of the possibilities into every sentence”—those multiple qualifications!—“and I really did not think I could do that.”
    From James, Didion learned how the mind decodes existence, sifting possibilities, balancing what it fears with paradoxical recognitions of pleasure. For a young reader, this was a new revelation of what fiction could do. No other form of human thought could touch it.
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    Her fears now had less to do with collapsed bridges than with changes in her body and awareness that others responded to those changes. She became obsessed with news stories about Suzanne Degnan, a six-year-old on the North Side of Chicago who had been kidnapped from her bed by a college boy, hacked up in a sink, and scattered into the city’s sewer system. The gory details recalled aspects of the Donner Party stories, but there was nothing natural about this tragedy. Though the victim was only six, the crime seemed to have something to do with sex, with female and male and the unpredictability of that mix.
    Didion’s notebook jottings—the ocean walkers, the romantic suicides—were doom-laden and dark, her imagination drawn to extremes that needn’t have been but were, toward mysteries of human impulses at their starkest. The sea strolls and kidnap stories had pioneer elements, traces of the outsider, the wayward and the lost, the emptiness and promise of back roads and branching trails, but the choices weren’t as clear ( take this cutoff or don’t? ) and the consequences less obvious than cannibalism ( hacked up and scattered into the sewer system? ). Self-invention, yes, manifest destiny—but reckless now. Mean. No sacrifice, no courage, no glory. The most celebrated of Didion’s early essays mimed