MUSINGS: Heatstroke and False Modesty

Self-delusion and the version of yourself that shows up uninvited

I always thought I was a Joan. The arched eyebrow of American letters. Cigarettes, migraines, dry martini clarity. A woman who stared down the cultural apocalypse and jotted something spare and devastating in the margins. I wanted that. The thin wrists, the detachment, the authority of restraint. I mistook coldness for sophistication. Distance for insight.

But I wasn’t a Joan. I’m an Eve. I always was.

It was one of those Beachwood Canyon nights; hazy, slow, too warm in that performative L.A. way. I was halfway through a drink I didn’t want, half-listening to a conversation I’d already tuned out, when someone said something that landed just wrong enough to echo.

“You’re the kind of girl who ends up as a footnote in someone else’s novel,” he said. “Not the muse. The mistake.”

I smiled. “Better a mistake than an afterthought,” I said, and finished my drink.

Not quite an insult. Certainly not flattery. Just close enough to sting. It lingered—not because it was true, exactly, but because it grazed something I’d been orbiting for years. A version of myself I’d dressed up in anecdotes but never faced directly.

The truth is, I wanted to be known. I wanted to feel everything, even the worst of it. I stayed too long in the wrong places because they made for better stories. I wasn’t removed. I was obsessive, impulsive, a little slutty, always late, rarely wrong. I didn’t study Los Angeles; I let it claim me, sunburned and smiling.

Joan would’ve written about the party ending—the silence, the spilled drinks, the fade to regret. Eve never left. She lingered, talked too long, let the night collapse without apology.

There’s something bleakly funny about realizing your idols were never meant to be lived in. Joan was an idea: restraint, precision, the illusion of control. She observed chaos from a safe distance and turned it into literature. But what I had was sweat and static. Beautiful men I didn’t like. Stories that started with good intentions and ended in voicemail apologies.

Joan dissected collapse like a surgeon. Eve fucked it and took notes. Joan escaped to the desert. Eve was born in the heat. Joan wrote the rules. Eve ignored them.

Joan watched from the edge. Eve was in the frame—half-naked, laughing, not sorry.

That’s the difference. Joan wanted the truth to be clean and Eve knew it never was.

And here I am: Eve in Joan drag. Watching the sunset from a borrowed balcony. Writing this not from a quiet room in Sacramento, but somewhere too loud, too late, with my phone buzzing and lipstain smudged on a wine glass.

It’s not a tragedy. It’s just the truth. Which, in the end, is what they were both after not the performance of clarity, but the real thing. Even if it shows up messy, self-indulgent, wine-soaked, and late to its own point.

So fine. I’m not a Joan. I’m an Eve. And maybe the most Didion thing I can do is admit it.

.