Sad Queer Books: Why My Melancholy Heart Loves Joan Didion / Brandon Taylor

"I'm always drawn to the wretched and the unhappy, those who nurse their wounds quietly and consider the passing golden hue of the sun."

I consider myself to be a sad person because I believe sadness to be a virtue of the self and that happiness exists for the benefit of other people. I am of course speaking of aesthetic sadness — the flat, gray press of foreboding weather, faces strained tight with grief, reddened eyes, dark interiors — and the accumulation of stylistic choices that give rise to that sharp ache in your chest when you read a moving passage or stare too long at an editorial in Kinfolk. It’s the lusterless beauty of drained vitality, that which forces us to turn inward on ourselves and to attend to the chorus of doubts, fears, worries that rise up in the backs of our minds. I’m always drawn to the wretched and the unhappy, those who nurse their wounds quietly and consider the passing golden hue of the sun. In the face of all of that, who cares for happiness, all that dopey aping of genuine affect, genuine feeling; happiness is inherently a two-party state, and don’t we always doubt people who seem like they’re enjoying themselves too much? ...

Maybe that’s why I find Joan Didion’s work so comforting. Her style is crisp melancholy, conjuring up in exacting detail things which have already been lost. In her novels, the characters recollect and maim one another and themselves with their memory. In her essays and memoir, she is just as demanding. The details are swift, sharp, and seem to emerge from the encroaching veil of the past, like birds fleeing before a terrible storm. She writes fragmented, parallel timelines that converge, not like puzzle pieces laying side by side but like an array of filters that give rise to greater depth of color and form. Her writing is sad, but in a way that calls to mind queer writers, who have always had to engineer new forms to contain their grief and to attempt to convey what it means to live a life nested inside of another life. ... [mehr] https://www.them.us/story/sad-queer-books-joan-didion