Ouro puro

O Gregory Dunne, aquele rapaz que entrou no filme "Who's That Girl?" com a Madonna, fez um documentário sobre a sua tia, a Joan Didion, que é tão bom, tão bom! Está no Netflix e chama-se "The Center Will Not Hold". Há uma parte que é descrita em baixo, nesta peça da The New Yorker, da qual me lembro nitidamente porque quando ouvi a resposta de Joan Didion fiquei estupefacta com a franqueza, mas também fiquei cheia de curiosidade de ler a senhora.

"In one of several genial interviews, Dunne asks Didion about an indelible scene toward the end of her Haight-Ashbury essay—which, as any student who has ever taken a course in literary nonfiction knows, culminates with the writer’s encounter with a five-year-old girl, Susan, whose mother has given her LSD. Didion finds Susan sitting on a living-room floor, reading a comic book and dressed in a peacoat. “She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick,” Didion writes. Dunne asks Didion what it was like, as a journalist, to be faced with a small child who was tripping. Didion, who is sitting on the couch in her living room, dressed in a gray cashmere sweater with a fine gold chain around her neck and fine gold hair framing her face, begins. “Well, it was . . .” She pauses, casts her eyes down, thinking, blinking, and a viewer mentally answers the question on her behalf: Well, it was appalling. I wanted to call an ambulance. I wanted to call the police. I wanted to help. I wanted to weep. I wanted to get the hell out of there and get home to my own two-year-old daughter, and protect her from the present and the future. After seven long seconds, Didion raises her chin and meets Dunne’s eye. “Let me tell you, it was gold,” she says. The ghost of a smile creeps across her face, and her eyes gleam. “You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.”

Fonte: The New Yorker, 27/10/2017