What I found most fascinating about the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold were Didion’s gestures. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her arms, her hands, the reaching and grasping, her gestures saying as much in their own way as her words.
In the new footage shot for the documentary of Joan now, in her early 80s, her gestures are very big, but it’s a much smaller movement that I can’t get out of my head.
In a clip from a Charlie Rose interview done following the release of her 2005 book The Year of Magical Thinking about the death of her husband, Didion says, “Well, I think the hardest thing was finishing it, because, for as long as I was writing it, I was in touch with him in some way, you know?” It sounds as if perhaps there’s a small hint of a quiver in her voice. Seconds pass. Then Rose asks, “And when you finished the book?”
It’s such a small gesture. So fast. So offhand. A flick of the wrist. A thing tossed away.




Watching it, I exhaled suddenly as if I’d been punched in the gut.
Notes
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