In 2011, journalist Hari Kunzru interviewed Joan Didion for a British magazine and covered many topics, including her 1969 Corvette Stingray, made famous in photographs Julian Wasser shot for Life Magazine in 1972. Here are some excerpts. (Find more at this link.)
HK: I read an old interview with you this morning, from when you were living in California [‘Joan Didion: Staking out California’ – Michiko Kakutani, Joan Didion, Essays and Conversations] which said that the 1969 Yellow Corvette Sting Ray Maria drives in Play It As It Lays was actually your car.
JD: It was my car.
HK: Do you still feel connected to that woman? The woman who drove along the coast road to Malibu in a Yellow Corvette Sting Ray?
JD: No. At some point in the past year I think I twigged to the fact that I was no longer the woman in the Yellow Corvette. Very recently. It wasn’t five years ago.
HK: When you said you ‘twigged to that’, was that a moving on, a sense of loss –
JD: Actually, when John died, for the first time I thought – for the first time I realized how old I was, because I’d always thought of myself – when John was alive I saw myself through his eyes and he saw me as how old I was when we got married – and so when he died I kind of looked at myself in a different way. And this has kept on since then. The yellow corvette. When I gave up the yellow corvette, I literally gave up on it, I turned it in on a Volvo station wagon [laughs]
HK: [laughing] That’s quite an extreme maneuver.
JD: The dealer was baffled.
HK: The Corvette driver would mutate into the Volvo driver. Was that because you were leaving California?
JD: No, we had just moved in from Malibu in to Brentwood. I needed a new car because with the Corvette something was always wrong, but I didn’t need a Volvo station wagon. Maybe it was the idea of moving into Brentwood.
HK: You were really trying to embody that suburban role. So the Corvette was the car you were driving down the foggy road and trying to work out where the turn for your drive was, and where was just a steep cliff.
JD: Yes.
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