On Self-Respect

by Joan Didion

“Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power" was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.​ Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Feminism, Psychology, American, Female Authors

5 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

Reviews

[Sitaphul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why is Didion’s “On Self-Respect” so lauded, 60 years later? There are some takeaways here, but in this case, I'll just leave them where they are, because it’s hard to pretend that the abject racism at the heart of the piece is marginal to the meaning of the essay, although dominant cultural education teaches us that white writers are entitled to this consideration. Readers will continue to glide over whole paragraphs of ridiculousness, and push those parts of the writing to the periphery of "what she's really trying to say," then get poetic about the "larger significance" of this essay, which, yet again, marginalizes the nonwhite reader who sees that there are some gaping problems here. Read carefully for the "hostile Indian," read for her take on Manifest Destiny, read for Didion's concept of "free land" (my eyes bugged out when I saw that phrase, I initially read it as "to free the land," but the sentiment is the same), read for "Chinese Gordon" (her unironic use of the racist name a British imperialist was given by the Brits) and his "clean white suit." She uses the image of the "hostile Indian" as a specter to the ongoing narrative project of white self-referentiality and purpose. She writes, "Indians were simply part of the donnée. In one guise or another, they always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price." She continues, "People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, the venture will go bankrupt….they are willing to invest something of themselves..." She does not invoke the violence of the white settler colonist. We should be more concerned about this, right? This essay isn't simply "of its era."

She also says self-respect must be a "discipline of the mind," which is the kind of mentalist argument about one's identity and inner world that those who have an impatience for the vastness of conscious experience will make. (She said her innocence ended when she didn't make Phi Beta Kappa, which made me laugh out loud.) The subtext here is that Didion has little sympathy for rumination, or flashbacks, or internal replays of the past, or guilt, or anxiety about the harm you may have caused or that may have come your way - the ways in which people cope - well, she thinks it isn't useful. Own up to what you've done, blow into a bag, get some oxygen, give yourself a reality check, show yourself how absurd life is, but don't sit there crying, she says. Take a cold shower because you don't want to come across as hysterical, to others, much less yourself. The message is, get a hold of yourself and your inner narrative, some self-control won't hurt. Sure, it's A piece of advice, a bit stoic, perhaps useful at times, maybe it comes from the depth of her own emotional experience, but imagine saying that to a friend who experiences chronic trauma. This is why I dislike this essay, I thought it completely lacked generosity. I don't know who her audience was, but it reeked of the California elitism and blasé of a certain set of writers, the privilege of their tiny, white, circles in the hills of Los Angeles, their belief that they see things with an important, discerning eye - a snide superiority. But maybe I'm wrong, I often feel that I'm literally not reading the same essay or book as other readers. Still, it's strange to see how writers like Didion continue to be canonized, though sadly it isn't unusual at all.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read anything by Joan Didion before, and I'm a little in awe of how well this essay is written on a sheer technical level. This is a woman who has clearly put a lot of time into studying her craft. Every sentence is finely honed, every word is perfectly chosen, and the result is a ruthlessly elegant flow of language. To ask for meaningful substance on top of such aesthetic precision seems almost greedy.

And yet, there is depth here. Real experience, deeply felt and considered with slow and deliberate regard over the course of many years. Her perspective is somehow simultaneously intensely personal and universal. I'm reminded of a dozen other works -- Camus, Sartre, Ba, Nietzsche, Weber, Cather, Hemingway, and more -- a constellation of authors who have very little in common except the way they deal with the importance of internal narrative and framing. And their shared impatience with self-involved sentimentality in the face of the world's objective cruelty and injustice.

I suppose the only reason I kept this at four stars is because, for all the clarity of language, Didion's position in this essay seems tenuous. She's describing something that isn't easily pinned down -- a state of being, a method of self regard, a feeling made into an operational mindset. On the one hand, she scorns the impulse to divest oneself of responsibility for one's actions by pointing to external causes and context, however real those causes and contexts might be. On the other, she warns against the dangers of taking too much responsibility for the feelings and desires of others.

Own your actions, but nothing more. Own your failures, but do not become mired in self-flagellation. Set aside your intentions, but don't disavow your desires. Lay bare your own bullshit. See your life only as it is. And never let that stop you from becoming more.

In this account, self-respect is a balancing act, and a fairly unforgiving one. It may be true. It may be that the only empowerment we can find in this world is by constantly holding ourselves pinned in the center of a raw and wary self-gaze.

But to me, it seems this center may not hold.

And underneath it all lies sorrow.

[Katarina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"..to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home."

[luca! · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for school. It was kind of racist and I felt like she was just making the same point over and over again without saying anything new.

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her flaunting of allusions to characters in novels was rather distracting and irritating, but probably considered proof of belonging to a certain class to readers of Vogue, where she worked when she wrote it. What's most impressive about this is that she wrote it when someone else missed a deadline and they needed an article on this topic to fill that hole in in the magazine layout, and fast.

This is merely one essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, one of Joan Didion's best essay collections, published in the 1960s. It's one of the few books I've read more than once. My favorite and one of my favorites of all her stories in many books is "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." It's a good example of what I like best about her writing, which is not just good writing but superb observation and insight.

[Clara · Rating 3 out of 5]

i’m in awe of the writing, yet it reeks of the popular 1960 california elitism and proposes kinda racist imagery? still, a technically flawless essay

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald’s failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we post- pone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.”
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnée.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weak- nesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one’s sanity becomes an object of speculation among one’s acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.



Source: http://www.vogue.com/3241115/joan-did...

[meowdeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

"self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag... the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag."

A brilliant essay - to read over and over in the transition from child to adult. A child places themself, understandably, at the center of all time and space. Adults must dispense themselves roundly of this illusion, and moreover we must place in check our sense of values and being. Otherwise we will be incapable of knowing a single object, let alone ourselves.

I see some criticism here of the author as racist, snooty, endorsing adultery, etc. Are we really going to continue with this infantile blathering line of liberal complaint? Joan Didion was a staunchly conservative 1930s super wealthy white woman. The racism (and oh yes she is racist! "Indians", "free land in California", "Chinese"), the automatic reduction of anyone who isn't white - I mean, duh. Comes with purchase. Surely no one is truly surprised? My interest lies not dissecting her specific psychology but rather in her instruction for how I might understand my own.

"to have that sense of sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love, and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."

https://yale.learningu.org/download/8...

[lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”

wish she went this hard in more paragraphs!

[Roberta Suárez]

"There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation."

[Liliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a find. Kind of wish to frame it now.

[Summer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought I'd read this since I've seen in popping up in aesthetic collages on Pinterest

2.5 stars, might lower or round down.

I have mixed thoughts and feelings.

First of all, this line: "However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves." - absolutely amazing. I love how dramatic writers are. Like genuinely this is why I read.

But conceptually it fell a little flat for me. There is a sort of sort of superficial cohesiveness and efficiency to her writing here. It has that authoritative voice that works so well for her, but here it seems to be not much more than a sheen on what I what I find to be conceptually messy.

It's also pretty racist, 'Indians are always hostile, will always be hostile' etc...


So I read this 3 times to try and really get what she's saying here. I do have a headache that's been making it hard to focus, but I also find this to be almost riddle-like at times and strangely organized.

This is my rough summation/organization of ideas.

- Self-respect is to realize your flaws and to accept them as part of your self (as opposed to always justifying your behavior by blaming external circumstance).

-she argues to have the 'courage of your mistakes', meaning accept unfavorable outcomes of your mistakes. So if you're an adulterer, don't run to the couple you've hurt for absolution and don't complain about of being embarrassed.

- She notes initially that self-respect isn't a magic shield to avoid trouble, although later notes that having it should stop you from replaying mistakes over again in your head and from becoming a soul-less people pleaser.

Interesting to note is that her conception of self-respect is entirely a reflective, retrospective thing.

-she brings up character but really didn't have to, since she then goes on to use it and define it synonymously with how she's described self-respect.

- the last paragraphs really lost me, mostly because I don't understand the examples and references? But to me it felt like the start of this paragraph entirely contradicted the end?

[Shaghayegh.l3 · Rating 2 out of 5]

هیاهوی بسیار برای هیچ.

[Vanessa Dib · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please do forgive my simplistic writing…I started reading this essay at an ungodly hour on a Tuesday in Southern California and fell asleep reading it (primarily from a place of physical exhaustion rather than disinterest, I promise)…and I have re-read and finished it at SLC airport in good ole Utah. What I love about reading is that between now and when I reflect on “On Self-Respect” in years, I will always remember where and how I finished it. The impending threat of a middle seat on Delta (of all airlines…), the slight widening of my eyes when I read the words: “I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me,” the memories of the mountains that feel so close yet so far (and oddly enough, remind me of home). This beautiful time in my life. A time where I am free of responsibility for, and commitment to, anyone but myself…anyone but the Self that I am building. Carefree. Unchained. Boundless. In moments like these, how can I not feel like I have all the self-respect in the world?

Joan Didion’s claim on self-respect is unshakeable: self-respect is equivalent to "character" which is equivalent to a refusal to fall into victimhood. A lack of self-respect is the fixation on one’s shortcomings, failures, and losses. This doesn't mean that the presence of self-respect entails completely rejecting the mere hint of failure, it just means that these are not centered in your life... that these shouldn't be the default way to feel.

Didion asserts that having self-respect is a "private reconciliation" rather than a publicly ingenuine and artificial confidence. People with self-respect are not disillusioned; they are incredibly candid with themselves and try to see things for what they are. Perhaps my favorite quote ever is as follows:

"People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the underserved embarrassment, of being named correspondent. If they choose to forego their work-say it is screenwriting-in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank."

Self-respect and accountability then come hand-in-hand. This private reconciliation cannot exist in the presence of victimhood. Victimhood, then, becomes the antithesis of self-respect. To live as a victim is to cast oneself as blameless, sanctified, beyond scrutiny. But in doing so, one slips onto a pedestal—and anything on a pedestal is, by definition, distorted. Seen from below, it looms larger than life; in truth, it is only an inflated projection, not the real thing. To respect that version of yourself would be to respect a fiction, not a person. And self-respect, as Didion reminds us, cannot be founded on delusion. It must be anchored in the unvarnished recognition of who you are—failures included, mistakes owned, illusions stripped away.

Boundaries are self-imposed lines, shaped by our values. Without them, how can one truly claim to respect themselves—especially when those lines are drawn but not honored?

This truth is reflected in the familiar words: “We accept the love we think we deserve.” When we have not fostered a strong sense of worth, we naturally begin to settle—for relationships that diminish us, for treatment that falls short of what we need. We mistake scarcity for destiny, and call it all we are worthy of. But when self-respect runs deep, what we allow into our lives matches the value we recognize in ourselves.

This is a great first essay to read, and I dare say it might’ve very well inspired the creation of many to follow.

[Hélène · Rating 5 out of 5]

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is
potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain
indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of
either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand
forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little
perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are
peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since
our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. “


“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of
self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”

“Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in
Appointment in Samara and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbably candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace,
avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.” Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not
then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the
wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved
embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect
exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once
called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes
loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues”

[liana]

my name mentioned!!

[deena · Rating 3 out of 5]

i have thoughts!!!!

[zoe k · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such good writing packed with literary references and an interesting message about how one’s intrinsic worth constitutes self respect. I was just really thrown off by the outdated analogy about Indigenous people having no self respect and that’s why they were colonized…

[Maria Uzma Ansari · Rating 2 out of 5]

casual tone towards colonization and violence; other dated ideas.

[Rafya · Rating 5 out of 5]

the reminder was needed

[Xavier Nance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Purrrr

[Addy Fowler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yum

[Pratyasha Pokhrel · Rating 4 out of 5]

“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect."

[البندري · Rating 5 out of 5]

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must find this book and read it, then give it to my daughter. Didion is a brilliant, accessible writer that should be read by all young girls. This should be a companion piece to Men Explain Things To Me. LMAO.

It's true. Without self-respect, life is ungovernable.

[lehnachos ✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is simply one of my favorite pieces of writing ever. The number of times I come back to this essay is just insane. I always have my post it notes filled with excerpts from this essay all over my room. Thanks to Joan Didion every day for existing and for writing.

[Emma Laine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this monthly & I think it should be required reading genuinely it puts me back in my place

[Yoli · Rating 2 out of 5]

This y'all literary king? ..... racist wh*te women sharing basic 'philosophical' thoughts that 11 year olds have.

[hania · Rating 2 out of 5]

tremendously written, yet still a mixed bag of wisdom and casual racism towards native americans ("indians were simply part of the donnée"). jo lost me when she went a few generations back to the good ole days of discipline, and then dove right into the good ole american colonialist mindset by linking the colonizers' discipline to a righteous self-respect. didion, a california native (!), wholly embraces the "free land" grab and proudly claims that "people who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the indians will be hostile." ironically enough, didion's life potion amounts here to 'simply' stopping the wallowing and getting ahold of yourself. as with many of america's great minds, didion's analytical brilliance simultaneously brings a severance from compassion, a feeling as timeless as california's redwoods. does self-respect even matter if morality is not a priority?

[hur]

On a second, closer read this does not hold up. The central idea of the essay is not that bright, it doesn't warrant the racism (nothing does.) but it also isn't old enough or great enough to skip. She wants you to practice self-respect and makes no effort in making it a collective issue, Didion is rarely concerned with community or tangible history. Afterall self-respect comes naturally to people like Didion, the people who have their house "infiltrated" by the fortunately "not hostile" Indians. You can't possibly read this essay posed as philosophical and objective and ignore the settler colonial basis that this is entirely based on.