The Use and Abuse of Joan Didion

“It was just as nice as I hoped and dreamed it would be,” sobs a young bride in the final line of Joan Didion’s piece “Marrying Absurd.” Just a few pages and slotted neatly in the Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection before more renowned essays, Didion’s portrait of the Las Vegas wedding industry is full of jarring details. Shotgun marriages, chapels that churn through many ceremonies in one night, panic weddings to improve one’s Vietnam draft status—it is, of course, an essay about the institution of marriage run amok, but it is also a piece about how meaning is created and conferred, a meditation on how ceremonies can convey great emotion through semblance and not substance, and the ways in which we yearn to feel connected to deep things we desire yet barely know.