Joan Didion makes excuses for her own rediculousness. Though her odd quality isn't a bad thing - it's good, in fact - she makes excuses for it as if it were a vice. Essentially, she is obsessive-compulsive about writing things down; about keeping a faithful record of misplaced mental items. In her essay, On Keeping a Diary, Didion uses a word - compulsion - to describe her habit, and this word is singularly pivotal to the meaning of her entire piece.
By using the specific word "compulsion," Didion is being very suggestive, knowing the word has direct meaning as well as connotation that she knows her reader will pick up on. She implies that her habit is instinctive, innate and imbued within her so naturally that it is so powerful in her mind that it controls even her memory, "maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow" (Didion 2). With this word comes a picture in her reader's mind - a picture of Joan, hunched over her little, dog-eared notebook and pencil stub, furiously fulfilling her impulsive need to preserve in writing something that often seems like gibberish, even to her, later on. Sometimes, though, the jotted notations of random details serve as landmarks in her past, from which Didiom references whole experiences and memories.
Joan Didion's choice of a single word steers he piece so specifically that without it, her outcome and message would be entirely different. She is a writer with a keen imagination, but her "compulsion" takes her a step further, making her write down trivial or random details and integrating them, sometimes falsely, into the archives of her memory. But, false or otherwise, these snapshots conjure up real emotions and connections in Didion's head, making them more important than the strictly real events and facts.
