The Didion Essay I'd Assumed Would One Day Ruin My Life

An excerpt of "The Most Wonderful Terrible Person"

The Joan Didion essay in question, included in her 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

One day in the early 1990s, I heard a colleague of mine in the English department at Marymount musing about Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers,” weighing the merits of teaching it to his seniors in conjunction with The Great Gatsby, both stories about strivers run amok.

I was horrified. I had never talked about that essay—not in high school, not in college—with one exception: my best friend Jill Bickett, chair of our English department, to whom I immediately ran with this information. I feared some student might ask if the “Debbie” in the essay was me, as far-fetched as that would be given the time and distance I’d created from that fourteen-year-old girl. Still, what if an excited student passed on the news to her parents, who would then call the school demanding to know if one of their teachers had been hired without revealing her sullied and infamous past? I would be called in, excuses would be made; the school couldn’t be embarrassed this way, and I would lose everything.

I had always known that essay would one day ruin my life, and now it was happening. The situation worked itself out because the teacher ended up not teaching the essay, and I was off the hook, for the time being.

Then, in October 1991, I sat on my pink couch at home in Venice looking through my books on writing for a good descriptive essay describing a place that reflected the author’s feelings. I found myself once more reading Didion’s essay, and then I read it again. It had, for so many years, caused me to keep silent about my past. I read Didion’s descriptions of us, of my mother, and of where we lived through my adult eyes. I saw that what Didion saw and wrote were in fact spot-on.

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I was an adult. My mother was dead. Didion was a genius. I was free to have my own opinions. I saw that my mother hadn’t fooled Didion. We were a modern-day Joad family. My burdens were lifted.

I decided to write to Didion. I wanted her to know what had become of us. Guy was a dentist. Ron was a high school English teacher. Kimi was dead.

My letter began:

Dear Joan Didion,

I am anxious, angry, and jealous as my fragile self-esteem evaporates. I just can’t seem to avoid

“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” It helped to make you famous, but it’s my life.

I anxiously awaited her reply, which arrived six months later. In it, she wrote:

Dear Debra Miller, I’ve begun this letter so many times, because there’s no real way to tell you how moved I was (am) by your letter.

Then, the letter moved away from me and talked about the weird relationship between an author and her subject.

She continued:

As a writer I tend to compartmentalize the people and events I’ve written about—the writer goes in, tries to understand the story, as if the act of writing it down completed the situation, became the truth. I guess I think writers need to do this, have to do this to maintain the nerve to write anything at all. But of course it’s an illusion.

I’m glad you wrote to me. Thank you.

Six years later, I had the occasion to meet Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. My husband’s daughter, Robin, was a Times columnist and would be interviewing Didion on stage about her latest novel, The Last Thing He Wanted.

Debra Miller

Robin let me know that Didion could be aloof and not to expect anything from her. I thought she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. But that’s not what happened. When Robin introduced us backstage, Didion threw her arms around me, called her husband over to meet me, then tucked her arm in mine and escorted me into the auditorium and sat me down beside her. We sat in the audience together while C. Shelby Coffey III read an excerpt from “Some Dreamers,” focusing on the moment my father burned to death, and she grabbed my arm and gave it a hug. Years of mortification melted away.

Sometime after that, I told my colleagues at school the long-held secret—that Ms. Miller was “Debbie,” the fourteen-year-old who cried out for her mother when the judge read the guilty verdict. I told my story to each junior English class thereafter, inviting them to ask me anything they wanted. It was a giant relief to have this secret set free.

Today, I’m proud to be the subject of a Joan Didion essay. When I talk about “Some Dreamers,” people are usually fascinated. It’s part of the reason I wrote this book.

When I heard that Didion died, the loss felt personal. I called my brother Ron to talk about what she had meant in our lives.

If not for her essay, I would not be the woman I am today, a woman inspired to write her own story, a woman who survived and flourished rather than succumb to the darkness that once beckoned me and that consumed my mother.

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From The Most Wonderful Terrible Person ©Debra Miller, with permission from She Writes.