By Joan Didion
Knopf: 192 pages, $23
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Joan Didion is one of America’s greatest writers. She is also, thanks to her equal mastery of images, one of its greatest icons. There she is, leaning on that yellow Corvette, perched by that massive typewriter, side-eyeing her family on that Malibu balcony.
Her two memoirs of horrific loss, “
Blue Nights,” punctured Didion’s unobtainable aura in a way that, paradoxically, only amplified her status. Circa 2012, she was the writer nearly every young woman wanted to be. She was aspirational; she became a brand. Her famous packing list became a Vogue.com shopping slideshow; her famous shades made her the star of a Céline ad, an icon of fragility and resilience.