“The Center Will Not Hold” is an intimate peek into Joan Didion’s life. She’s so close to you that it’s like she’s sitting next to you on the couch – as if you could feel the subtle dip in the next cushion from her slight frame.

Most people recognize her name and many know her novels, reporting, memoirs, and that she has outlived her husband and daughter. I hadn’t known most of her story but felt instantly that I wanted to know everything.

She reminds me of my former boss – an elegant and supremely wise French woman who spent her life fighting against the death penalty, conducting missions for the UN and the EU, and advocating for the most vulnerable among us – in their telling of the raw facts, answering questions with intention and refusing to bull shit. You sense that Didion is not fully enjoying the documentary process but understands that people want to know the details of her life, as told by her.

One particular moment, which is the focus of this review by Rebecca Mead, that took my breath away was when the narrator of the film, Didion’s nephew, asked her what it was like to find a little seven-year-old girl, Susan, tripping on acid when she was researching a piece about the hippie movement in the 1960s. Susan had the distinct white lips and was sitting alone on the living-room floor. It took Didion several seconds to answer, but when she did, she said, “It was gold.”

I was initially shocked and disturbed by Didion’s honesty, but I came to appreciate it. We need people to report tough stories, and to do so effectively, we also need for them to be a bit, if not very, detached from them.

Didion was a reporter and that moment – one that reporters “live for” – provided her with a captivating example of a movement that people often took as benign. She saw moments like that as gifts, whether the merits of them were “good” or “bad” was a different story.

In Mead’s review of the film she notes that most people, in response to the Susan encounter, would have the very “human” response: It was awful and dreadful and I knew I needed to do something to save this poor, vulnerable child from her deranged mother.

But, if you think about it, what is more human than identifying something that you need and being happy that you’ve found it? I don’t think Didion’s response is any less human than the non-reporter’s just because it wasn’t the most compassionate. She wasn’t driven to write about social and political life because she was a sadist – she knew that for a mother to give a child a hallucinogen was awful and wrong and depraved, but because that wasn’t her first reaction doesn’t make it dishonorable.

Thank you, Joan, for your honesty about your reaction. You correctly identified a moment that served your purpose and in doing so, seized it and shared it with the world so that we could all come to know a greater truth.

We are human and we have immediate reactions – judgments – but it is what we do with them that defines us.

Photo by: James Pritchett