Credit: Everett Collection
To be a certain kind of girl (or boy, though their heroes always seem a little easier to come by) is to dream at some point of growing up to be Joan Didion. In the diamond-cut clarity of her prose, both fiction and journalism found a new touchstone; in her cool-eyed persona — that famed mystique, wreathed in cigarette smoke and ennui — lay the promise of a life less ordinary, one where glamour and gravitas could somehow coexist.
In what implausible world, after all, would any mere writer — a woman, no less! And by then an octogenarian — be deemed aspirational enough to sell sunglasses that cost more than a smartphone, as Didion did in a 2015 ad campaign for the Parisian fashion house Céline? Or retain the sort of relevance, more than 50 years into her career, that the advent of a new collection becomes a bona fide literary event? Accordingly,