Weekend reads: Life with Joan Didion

A Q&A with the American writer Cory Leadbeater

When Joan Didion passed away in 2021 at the age of 87, the world lost a singular voice — an exquisite essayist, a searing social critic, a clear-eyed journalist who excavated the extremes of American culture.

The world lost a literary icon. But Cory Leadbeater lost a friend.

Leadbeater was an ambitious young writer with a difficult past when he took a job as Didion’s personal assistant. He soon found himself living in Didion’s luxurious Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan, inhabiting a realm totally unlike the one he’d grown up in.

In the opening of his memoir, The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion, Leadbeater writes that “my father had grown up on a gas station where his father beat him so badly that he left home at sixteen, and one generation on, he was in prison while I lived rent-free on 71st Street with Joan, where she taught me about fish and the New York Review and love.”

Didion opened both her home and her heart to Leadbeater, and in doing so, helped him to heal. “She was the one person in my life that I could tell anything,” Leadbeater told me. “I knew that she would not be judgmental. She understood the fundamental precarity of life. She understood that there were good reasons to want out. She understood that there were good reasons to take a grim view of things. And she understood what it looked like to keep your head down and work alone in the dark on a project day after day, year after year, decade after decade.”

Below, in a Q&A first published in The Globe and Mail, the author tells me about his friendship with the literary luminary. “I just really needed her,” he said in that interview. “I think that’s pretty obvious to everyone. I just really needed her. And there was only one Joan.”

How did you end up working for Joan Didion?

I had always known I was a writer. I graduated from undergrad into the recession and bummed around. I drove around the country in my truck and went to places that I wanted to write about — Oklahoma City, New Orleans — and came back home and was doing landscaping and substitute teaching, things that a lot of people my age were doing to get by during the recession. I ended up in graduate school. My favourite writer has always been W.H. Auden. When I got to Columbia, James Fenton was among the professors, and I knew Fenton had known Auden. I went to [him] and said, “Auden is my guiding light. If you could just tell me some stories about him, it would be so meaningful.” He took me to dinner, and we became fast friends.

I was at home one day in the summer in between my first and second year in the graduate program, and he sent me this cryptic e-mail. He said that there was a writer that he knew who was very well known, and she needed some help, and was I available? I, of course, said yes instantly. At one or two in the morning, he finally sent an e-mail: “It’s Joan Didion.”

It’s extremely rare to know your life has changed in the moment. Even if I had only known Joan for a month, or a few weeks, it would have changed my life. Little did I know that it would last nine years.

You write that Joan was “incapable of accepting any orthodoxy or received idea,” and so she lived in “a state of uncertainty.” It’s how she saw the Central Park Five were innocent, you point out, but also why she couldn’t go through a single day without a wildly detailed schedule.

I think the scheduling thing is illuminating. Even as she understood that the world was fundamentally disordered, she herself, in her personal life, was raging for order. She was incredibly fastidious and meticulous. Everything was labelled, everything was in its right place, always. I think raging for order in that part of her life was really the only way she could grapple with, and allow, the profound disorder of whatever subject she was looking at …

Current orthodox thought would not necessarily allow for an accurate analysis of one side’s particular strengths and flaws if they were going to be seen as somehow validating the opposing side. I think of one of her most controversial pieces through the years, her essay about the women’s movement, which got her in a lot of trouble at the time. I just think she looked at the particulars of a situation each time and tried to talk about them as honestly as possible, even if it sometimes cost her social or political points.

Living with Joan, you found yourself getting private tours of museums that opened just for her, dining with Oscar winners and Supreme Court justices. What was it like?

It was totally disorienting, very self-estranging, but completely exhilarating. I just thought, “If Joan sees something in me that is making her keep me around, then there is something in there — and I had better make sure that I preserve it at all costs.” That, at the time, to my very young mind, meant that I had better accelerate this work that I had been doing already, which was to try to eliminate or disappear the previous part of my life. I didn’t know what would happen if I said the wrong thing at dinner in front of the wrong person.

I was suddenly among the elite of the elite, and doing anything I could to get a foothold, to try to figure out the rules, to not blow it.

In the book, you write movingly about making a home with Joan, but also about the home you left behind and then rediscovered. How much of this book is about you coming to peace with where you are from?

Almost all of it. I absolutely took for granted how lucky I was to have two parents who, in the ways that they knew how, fostered the things in me that would become the most important things in my life. I know that the relationship with my father is a fraught element of the book. But when I said that I wanted to go to a private Jesuit high school because the public school in my town sucked, he got a second job. He was in his mid- to late-40s, and he was working the 5 a.m. shift as a tower operator at Port Authority, and then getting off work and going to a moving company with these 21-year-old guys. Just extraordinary.

It’s taken me a long time to understand. I think, also, having a daughter has helped me understand some of what that takes.

I grew up in a very strange place. It seems a conventional journey to start out resenting it, to think you’ve left it behind, and then to get pulled back, and think, “It wasn’t so bad.” But I still resent the hell out of it; it’s a very strange place. A lot of the people that I grew up with are on hard times, or are not with us any more, or are with us but not really with us. So, it’s not some beautiful suburban ideal that I have rediscovered. It’s more just that Joan chose to open her home to me and to love me and support me and protect me. And that allowed me to appreciate the people who did that first, my parents.

There’s a tension in the book between Joan, the human being you loved and lived with, and Joan, the icon. What do you miss most about Joan, the human being?

I don’t think we have enough time to talk about that. [Laughs] I miss how impossible it was to be with her and not be brutally truthful with yourself. If you were going to say something to her, you had better think about what you were going to say. That level of honesty with oneself, that’s religious. That is what people go to church and synagogue and mosque for. We discover that, and cultivate that, in the best relationships in our lives. And then to have that, with someone who is 60 years your senior, who is in many people’s estimations among the best writers of the past 100 years, with a brain like that? I get goosebumps just talking about it.

She could sit still for hours and say nothing. Then when she talked, suddenly you just had this long arm and hand [extending] out. It was like watching a flower bloom. You waited and waited and waited, and then suddenly right in front of you, this beautiful truth was there for you.

This interview has been edited and condensed.