Memory Goes MIA

Political Storytelling and Didion's Democracy

“In an era when even the best informed among us can routinely be misled, democracy depends on our ability to actively decide what we can or should believe.”

This line wouldn’t be out of place in an Op-Ed about the dangers of deepfakes and their impact on current elections. But instead, it’s from a 1984 letter to the editor published in the New York Times, from one Florella Orowan of Brookline, Massachusetts, addressing criticism of Joan Didion’s Democracy: A Novel.

Democracy (1984), one of the author’s lesser-known works, rarely appears on any of the Didion must-read lists. But according to her responses to the Warhol questionnaire, posed to her by Interview magazine’s Christopher Bollen in 2023, this is the work she was most proud of. It’s also relevant to this societal moment, and specifically these 2024 elections for the U.S. Presidency, 40 years after publication.

From the book jacket copy:

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his bid for the presidency. Her husband’s handler would like the press to forget that Inez’s father is a murderer. And, in 1975, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

The major casualty of the political life is memory. Leave it to Didion, to deftly pin and preserve a scarcely observed truth like that.

When I read it I felt a certain shakiness, the kind that accompanies a true statement I wish were not so. I didn’t understand what this meant right away. But its relevance clicked for me while reading last weekend’s coverage fact-checking the 2024 candidates’ stories.

I loved hearing Kamala Harris tell her origin story at the DNC on Thursday. How inspiring, to have a woman candidate for the Presidency who centers her own story of accomplishment in the brilliance and bravery and community spirit and compassion of her immigrant mother.

And to see her so warmly supported by the girls and women around her, from her adorable grandnieces teaching everyone how to pronounce her name, to her adoring step-daughter who calls her Mamala, to the warm and sincere words of Hilary Clinton, whose loss in 2016 broke so many hearts?

To quote the character “Joan Didion” in Democracy it makes me believe: “The past is not a prologue to the present. Anything can happen.”

I’m rooting so hard for a joyful next chapter in Kamala’s story, and in the history of the U.S. presidency.

So I was surprised by my unsettled reaction when on Sunday I read this article in my preferred prestige national media source, The New York Times. It fact-checks Harris’s origin story, namely how the way she identifies where she is from has evolved over the course of her political career.

In her acceptance speech, Harris emphasized that she grew up in the East Bay, specifically “the flats” rather than “the hills”.  In earlier speeches, she has referred to herself as a daughter of Oakland, and she was in fact born in a hospital in that city.

As it turns out, the cheerful unassuming yellow house where she grew up is located in Berkeley, CA. Technically, it’s true: Berkeley, which is jokingly called “The People’s Republic of Berkeley” in reference to its reputation as a far-left enclave, resides on the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay. She mentioned the city in her 2020 DNC speech as Joe Biden’s running mate, saying she got a “stroller’s eye view” of the streets of Oakland and Berkeley, as her parents marched for civil rights.

But in 2024, she’s dropped the specifics.

The NYT investigative reporter Alexandra Berzon, herself also from Berkeley, quotes a few residents of the city who forgive Harris the euphemisms. Close enough, they shrugged. Saying you’re from Berkeley codes too far out there for moderates or people not familiar with that part of the country. She has to do what she has to do, to win.

Between the glimpses we’re offered of how a candidate grew up and who she will be as a leader, there are gaps. It’s easy to unselfconsciously fill them with what we want to believe they mean, when we support her.

It made me think about a conversation I had on Saturday, at dinner with another feminist Democrat who also thinks it’s about damn time we here in the U.S. elect a woman to highest office, like those of you reading from Mexico, UK, New Zealand, Chile etc have already done.

We crowed over the obvious mendacity of lying liar who lies, J.D. Vance.

It seemed we’d both read Jessica Winter’s splashy piece “J.D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family” (New Yorker Aug 16) and the recent follow up published online on Aug 25, in which Winter reports fact-checking hobbyist Donna Morel’s corrections to Vance’s origin narrative.

Specifically, Winter draws upon census records, court documents and other unnamed sources unearthed by Morel to draw into question Vance’s narrative about his extended family.

Spoiler: Vance’s “pulled up by the bootstraps even though we had no boots” family narrative is full of holes. It turns out his great-grandpa had a fair paying union job. His grandparents had lived with his great-grandparents multiple times during a period in which Vance’s timeline suggests they were estranged and struggling. Vance acknowledges in his book that relatives of union members had a leg up to those good jobs, but elides the connection to his own story.

Vance’s American Dream narrative attributes his unlikely journey—from abandonment by his mother and generations of Appalachian poverty to Yale law school—to his Mawmaw and Pawpaw’s commitment to their marriage. That commitment to remaining married despite poverty and chaos led them to overcome violence and alcoholism, which made all the difference in his outcomes, the story goes.

Vance roots his kooky rhetoric about incentivizing a high birth rate within two parent households through tax credits and extra votes in elections, and to otherwise make stay-at-home mothering the norm in the U.S, in this piece of his story.

But it turns out he, too, has dropped the specifics. Winters’s and Morel’s timeline shows his story about his grandparents’ commitment to remain married is only technically true.

Records show that Mawmaw and Pawpaw each filed for divorce from the other at one point. His grandmother’s 1957 filing, when she was just 21, on account of “extreme cruelty,” was dismissed by the judge with no reason given. His grandfather then filed in 1981. At that time, they were granted a legal separation, requiring them to live apart from each other among other stipulations.

Vance was born in 1984. If his grandparents obeyed this directive of the court, he likely never knew them as a couple united under one roof—though technically it’s true that they remained married throughout their lives.

The major casualty of political life is memory.

It starts with the origin story. Technical truths. Details conveniently jettisoned to support the narrative conclusion. Democracy: A Novel dramatizes how these stories are made.

This is a novel in which style and substance are one, starting with the fictional character “Joan Didion,” who tells us what we’re reading is a novel (Call me the author). In addition to author of the novel, “Joan Didion” is a reporter and teacher, who show us her process of making the story through the technique of reportage. She attributes the novel’s narrative material to interview subjects and observations, triangulates of multiple versions of the same scene, creates chronological timelines based on news reports and other evidence, cites headlines supposedly clipped from real (or real-sounding) publications, describes B-roll, reproduces police reports—constantly challenging the reader to distinguish between fact and invention.

“Joan Didion” repeats resonant snippets of characters’ language and poignant details of the story, extracted from their immediate context, sometimes adding to them and sometimes taking information away. It all comes together piece by piece, the way cards from a shuffled deck and choices to discard work together to build a winning hand.

Take for example the first chapter, which introduces Inez and also Jack Lovett, a mysterious older man she met as a teenager and reconnects with twenty years later, during a family crisis. On the first page we meet them:

He said to her.

Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor.

Inez Victor who was born Inez Christian.

And then two pages later:

He said to her.

Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor (who was born Inez Christian) in the spring of 1975.

And then, to end the chapter:

“Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor, “Harry Victor’s wife.”

Last look through more than one door.
This is a hard story to tell.

Keeping track of who Inez is and who she has been at the same time is indeed hard, not only for the reader but for the character as well. Didion pieces together how she evolved from Inez Christian to Inez Victor or just Inez—a woman distinct from “Harry Victor’s wife,” who has run away to Kuala Lumpur with this man Jack Lovett—the way we might try to keep track of current events we cannot directly observe from a series of media clips and soundbites.

Specifically, we learn of her father Paul’s abandonment of his wife Carol in Honolulu for a peripatetic life in the company of a variety of men—and bohemian Carol’s subsequent escape to San Francisco, leaving Inez and her sister Janet to the care of Paul’s brother Dwight, a shipping entrepreneur and prominent member of the colonial social set.

Inez marries Senator Harry Victor, a 1972 Presidential hopeful whose run ends after an unsuccessful California primary. When she becomes Harry Victor’s wife, the details of her parents’ marriage become part of his story with a little massaging from his handler, Billy Dillon:

‘Partners in a surprisingly contemporary marriage in which each granted the other freedom to pursue wide-ranging interests,’ was how Billy Dillon had solved the enigma of Paul and Carol Christian for Harry Victor’s campaign biography. The writer had not been able to get it right and Billy Dillon had himself devised this slant.

Technical truth. Drop the specifics.

Billy Dillon makes up the story for “Harry Victor’s wife” and usually Inez goes along. The thrust of the book comes from a scene in which, while Billy is distracted with a phone call during an interview Inez didn’t want to give in the first place, she overrides his storymaking efforts by instead telling her unguarded version of the truth.

The campaign over, “Joan Didion” is present to cover the couple’s next move and reports the scene. When the AP reporter asks Inez what the greatest cost of life in the political spotlight has been she gives her own answer instead of the one she’s been coached to say:

“Memory, mainly.”

“Memory,” the woman from the Associated Press repeated.

“Memory, yes. Is what I would call the major cost. Definitely… Something like shock treatment.

“You mean you’ve had shock treatment.”

“You lose track. As if you’d had shock treatment.”

“I see. ‘Lose track’ of what exactly?”

“Of what happened.

“I see.”

“Of what you said. And didn’t say.”

“I see. Yes. During the campaign.”

“Well, no. During your—” Inez looked at me for help. I pretended to be absorbed in the Miami Herald…

“During your whole life.”

“You mentioned shock treatment. You haven’t personally—”

“I said no. Didn’t I say no? I said ‘as if.’ I said ‘something like.’ I meant you drop fuel. You jettison cargo. Eject the crew. You lose track.” ….

“Private moments,” Billy Dillon mouthed silently in the suite at the Hotel Doral.

Inez looked deliberately away from Billy Dillon…

“Things that might or might not be true get repeated in the clips until you can’t tell the difference.”

Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew. Didion repeats these fragments at various points throughout the novel, as metaphors for leaving out the inconvenient specifics.

When candidates drop fuel, jettison cargo, eject crew: does it change their memory? Do they come to believe the technical truths amount to the whole story? Are they telling us their story, or enlisting us in making up the story we want to believe?

The novel entertains with witty repartee and an insider atmosphere, but it also dramatizes how style, glamour and gossip distract us from other narratives that really matter. It reminds us that looking to the past, in real life if not in fiction, is not a reliable way to predict what will happen next.

On one level, Democracy is a family saga, the story of an unraveling power couple and their two fuck-up children, whose privilege ensures them respectable adulthood anyway. It’s a murder novel without mystery. It’s a romance. But the real story these narratives distract us from is a spy thriller, of significant geopolitical consequence.

Jack Lovett. Is he in the aerospace industry? The cargo industry? Banking? Is he a state actor or non-state actor? Whatever he’s been doing in Saigon, Honolulu, Jakarta, Manila, and on various Pacific atolls in the twenty years since he met Inez as a teenager and especially in 1975: there’s nothing pacific about it. But no one has asked the right questions, and by novel’s end it’s too late.

And so Democracy dramatizes how the bottom drops out: when we prioritize the fiction of individual triumphs over “the ‘long view’… history, the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely indifferent to individual efforts of anyone in it.”

While we focus on the candidates’ individual origin stories, the personalities, the style (or lack thereof—"young Abraham Lincoln” beard, anyone?): what connections to the historical past are we overlooking? And what narrative of the present convulsions are these stories conveniently standing in for?

Whether we quibble with how much of the honed, edited and spun background story of an opposing candidate is true or allow ourselves to be charmed by our candidate’s own story as told in the media we prefer, we fill in gaps between curated glimpses of their lives and how their leadership will play out. Consciously or not, we author a narrative of imagined connections.

I’m ready for Kamala Harris to start answering questions. To get into specifics about domestic and foreign policy and her platform, to fill in the gaps between abstractions like freedom and security and the concrete reality we’re living in.

Work, food, homes. Guns, babies, books.

War. Bombs. Hostages. Maimed children.

In a tight race, origin stories are easier to contain than skepticism. More entertaining. Less risky to our candidate.

But in an era when even the best informed among us can routinely be misled, when for the other presidential candidate even the technical truth has long been abandoned in favor of ellipses and outright lies, democracy depends on our ability to actively decide what we can or should believe.

Kamala, please tell us the rest of the story.

Other news

The National Book Festival was held last weekend. All Main Stage events were livestreamed and can be viewed on Library of Congress YouTube Channel. The opener had David M. Rubenstein interviewing James Patterson. Supposedly this was about his book with Matt Eversmann, The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: Their Stories Are Better Than Bestsellers. But they didn’t really stay on topic.

He also told a funny story about a book festival invitation that arrived addressed to both him and to Michael Crighton, whose widow entrusted him to finish Eruption. He said if Michael goes he’ll go. Now I’m wondering if our TFOB fiction committee knows how to hold a seance.

Just when I thought, “Could these guys Boomer any harder?”¹ Patterson called himself “a bright little motherfucker” and Rubenstein’s (lack of) reaction was worth every second of my viewing time. Skip to 1:31:00 for the highlight.

The author also announced James Patterson’s Substack is going live this week. Subscribe for some giveaways of his chewed up pencils if you’re in the market for a productivity talisman. Unless that was a joke?

In case you missed it

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1. I love all the intergenerational quirks and am proud of all my intergenerational friendships.