There’s a certain kind of literary man whose best work came with a woman behind the curtain: typing, editing, feeding the kids, holding the world together. Leo Tolstoy wouldn’t have published War and Peace without Sofia’s seven handwritten manuscripts. F. Scott Fitzgerald pillaged Zelda’s diaries for both dialogue and style, only to call her mad when she tried to write her own novel. Vladimir Nabokov still needed Vera to lick his stamps, revise his work, and drive him between lectures. These women weren’t just muses, but collaborators. Often, they were quiet victims of their husbands’ towering ambition; don’t get me started on Ted Hughes.
But not all mythic literary marriages have been so vampiric. For a long time, one marriage in particular offered an example of something better: that of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. The Didion-Dunne partnership signaled that a wife might become a magnificent writer not in spite of her husband, but because of him. Dunne seemed, in our modern parlance, like the ultimate “wife guy,” and I held him up as such. That is, until I read his recently reissued memoir, Vegas. Even in the most collaborative creative marriages, Vegas reminds us, a woman’s writing might still threaten the male ego, and that the “wife-guy” act is just what happens when the support act can’t quite bear the cost of being secondary.
This shouldn’t have surprised me. The term “wife guy” has become a punchline now, a meme of performative reverence: Prince Harry dancing with Meghan Markle in the delivery room; Mark Zuckerberg commissioning a statue of his wife, Priscilla. When “wife guy” peaked, it echoed a kind of post-#MeToo skepticism: was this love — or compensation? In June, The Atlantic published a soul-baring essay from one such man, who claimed the vulnerability required to broadcast your adoration is “the only state of being worth pursuing.” Jill Filipovic asked dryly in Slate: “Fellas, is it liberal to love your wife?”
Didion and Dunne had something quieter. Their partnership wasn’t a rapturous literary romance, but closer to a transactional equality, built on professional discipline and mutual respect. In the 2017 documentary The Center Will Not Hold, Didion described Dunne as the reliable one. He built fires in the mornings; made breakfast for their daughter, Quintana; and drove her to school. Didion would wake up bleary, drink a Coke, and start writing. Notes to John, her posthumously published therapy diary, describes the way that their collaborative screenwriting funded their life, a life they both enjoyed.
Dunne loved her more passionately than she loved him — “I don’t know what falling in love means” — but he also knew better than most how easily he could be written off. He understood that he could be written off merely as Didion’s husband, a footnote to someone else’s genius; in the same way that so many women down the ages had been written out of history for doing the very work he’d done.
“Their partnership wasn’t a rapturous literary romance, but closer to a transactional equality.”
Which is partly what makes Dunne’s Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, so compelling. Dunne didn’t wait for history to revise him; he did it himself, half-drunk in a hotel room, eating his fifth Twinkie, calling up yet another hooker from the Yellow Pages to take out for a drink. Though he suggested that the scene was a mix between “fantasy and reality,” in a letter to the writer Jane Howard, he confessed that the claim functioned to throw his mother off the scent (“I don’t think that will fool mum”).
The book has just been released by McNally Editions more than 50 years after it was published and then quickly fell out of print. It’s a lurid account of the almost year-long stretch Dunne spent in Vegas, having realized he was “going to die” someday. He abandoned his wife and young daughter in an attempt at self-destruction, a telling artifact of a particular kind of American male dissipation in the early Seventies, when the strictures of marriage were threatened by the ever-growing potential of a wife to outshine her husband.
It was the era of second wave feminism, a decade after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique swept the nation, when Gloria Steinem was proclaiming that “women are becoming the men they want to marry.” Didion was puncturing feminism in the The New York Times, writing that “nobody forces women to buy the package.” But she was living the ideals of the movement, making her own money through her writing, with a husband who edited her work, looked after their kid, and made her a better writer. A 1984 profile described the couple’s fame like this: “The Dunnes are walking along the beach one day when they meet Jesus. Later on that day, Dunne describes their miraculous encounter. ‘Ran into Jesus today.’ ‘Oh, really? What’d He say?’ ‘He loves Joan’s work!’”
We might think of today’s “wife guy” as a contemporary iteration of men like Dunne, whose supportive tendencies seethed under his envy — until they cracked. To his great credit, he was self-aware that tearing apart his life was childish; but in Vegas, everyone’s lives were imploding, so he felt at home. The Atlantic’s “wife guy” is busy crafting “vulnerability” into content, but Dunne understood that such confession is still a form of control. He described his secrets: how he first took Didion to bed; his life-long voyeurism; a fantasy of appearing on a tell-all interview show not to reveal himself, but to wrest back some narrative power. He knew he’d become, as the Los Angeles Times put it, a “reflected celebrity.”
Didion shone; Dunne cracked jokes in the corner.
Near the time he was writing Vegas, Didion had just published the essay “In the Islands,” which references their marital troubles: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,” she wrote. You’d expect Vegas to be Dunne’s rebuttal, a literary act of revenge, but the only person he truly skewered was himself.
They stayed together. Dunne wrote about the oddness of attending parties with Didion after her piece ran. “For depressed people, they certainly laugh a lot,” people would say. It wasn’t that Didion was always in control, just that her writing gave the illusion of it. “It was a kind of safe death wish,” Dunne observed of his compulsions. “Like trying to cut your wrists with an electric razor.” Didion’s prose sliced; his just shaved the surface.
There’s a scene in Vegas that distills the power imbalance. He rings Didion to tell her he has a date with a 19-year-old prostitute who is supposed to “suck and fuck” him. “It’s research,” she replies. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.” The power bounces between the couple, as Dunne tries to provoke Didion, and Didion, ever the great writer, insists that Dunne follow through. He is just drafting, but she has already distilled the action’s meaning. When she asks him later when he’ll come home, since she’s “lonely and depressed,” he quips back, “As soon as I get my life in order.” “Why not try living it?” she said, “For a change.”
Dunne knew he might be winning “the battles, but she was winning the war.”
In a city teeming with losers, it was really the women who came out on top. When Dunne left Artha, the young prostitute, he would invariably wander “alone through the casinos on the Strip, staring at all those men who looked like sun-tanned liver marks, all cardigan sweaters and pinky rings, men who seemed to have spent too much time in saunas and steam rooms.” These men — sweating, conniving, and paying for sex — have melted into blobs of steam, dripping and off-putting. The washed-up comedian he befriended was “never without a cold,” always oozing something wretched.
Dunne’s existential crisis erupted when a doctor told him he has “soft shoulders.” This diagnosis was literal, but the symbolism was louder: the American man, once hard-edged and certain, was morphing into something slack. His fellow New Journalist Hunter S Thompson described a similar “gross, physical salute” in his own Vegas book, Fear and Loathing: “How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? … This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood?” The body was the message, and the message was that men are not OK.
But Artha and the other women in the book weren’t disintegrating; they were made of harder stuff. They bounced through sexual transactions without illusions, understanding who the winners and losers are. They had left behind not loving wives for the city of sin, but abusive husbands, deadbeat families, towns with no hope. They were American pioneers, forging futures for themselves, however grimly, and they were not under the illusion that bewitched Dunne: namely, that he “vandalized other people’s lives instead of coming to grips with [his own].” Rather, these women vandalized other people’s lives precisely in order to come to grips with their own. The difference was that the men were falling apart because they’d lost power, while the women were pulling themselves together because they didn’t have any to begin with.
Didion and Artha knew the deal. To use other people, you must do so with respect, greater purpose, and style. That was the promise of the Seventies women’s movement, that women might finally take what men always had: the right to be brilliant and ruthless at once. In fact, while Dunne was awol in Vegas, Didion wrote her greatest novel, Play It as It Lays. She was lonely and sad, it shows in the book, while he was disintegrating into something rotten. So when he came back to his real life (“the fever had broken”), we can deduce that it wasn’t because Didion needed him, nor Dunne her — it was that they wanted each other.
The modern man’s pose of feminist devotion often conceals a hunger for credit; something Dunne, in his darker way, had already forfeited. Their union suggested marriage might mean something different from love or possession: a long improvisation between people who understood that to love each other didn’t mean always being good or even generous, but to be “fantastically dependent on each other.” If today’s “wife guy” aims to make husbandly adoration legible, Dunne’s devotion was neurotic, intermittently self-aware, but ultimately unconditional. He fled to Vegas to unravel, convinced that his wife’s brilliance was his emasculation, but he came home to that brilliance eventually, and Didion let him.
In the end, what endures is not the partnership, but the residue it left: two bodies of work that are unevenly valued but deeply entangled. Dunne, ever conscious of the camera turning toward Didion, staged his own diminishment with theatrical flair. But there’s a reason this book faded out of print. We already know how it ends: it is Didion who emerged cool and unflinching, the better story, having written the scene, placed the props, and cast herself in the part of the woman who survives. Dunne was right to fear death, the anxiety that launched his breakdown: he died suddenly of a heart attack a few decades later as he sat down to dinner with Didion. What followed was Didion’s bestselling book, The Year of Magical Thinking, a luminous container of unspeakable grief, spoken. She got the last word, like she always did.
