In Bed

What a 57-year-old Joan Didion essay can teach you about migraines and caring for people with subjective symptoms

Last summer, a nephew of mine was reading Joan Didion’s The White Album on the beach. When he dozed off, I borrowed the book and read the essay “On The Morning After the Sixties.” I immediately added the book to my “To Read” list on Goodreads.

I just finished the book. The prose are beautiful and the diversity of style impressive. Some essays are straight reportage. Others, the ones I like best, share wisdom in subtle, almost sneaky ways. I’d not be sure what an essay was about, and I figured I was just supposed to absorb interesting points, but eventually, I’d come to appreciate the larger message. The metaphor that comes to mind is biking up an ascent of switchbacks, with different views at each turn, but the whole vista is only revealed at the peak.¹ The collection was published in 1979 and brings together essays published in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. It manages to be very much of its time and remarkably prescient.

The essay In Bed appears about three-quarters of the way through the book.² Joan Didion was a migraineur.³ The essay explains the salient points about migraines better than most medical textbooks. It also illustrates what it is like to live with a disease that only manifests itself with subjective symptoms; symptoms whose severity a doctor can’t know or measure.