Joan Didion s Long View | The Nation
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John Quin
, April 3rd, 2021 09:26
John Quin admires Joan Didion’s late collection
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Here’s Joan Didion on roving reporter mode at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Gardenia, the draw-poker capital of Los Angeles County. A penitent says their ideal, the aim of the programme, is “getting serenity”. Didion balks at that: she associates serenity with death. Joan doesn’t do
serenity: she’s been proven right in her anxieties for decades.
It’s 2021 and entirely appropriate to be nervous now. Didion, perhaps more than any other contemporary American writer, grasps the sadness in the deluded idea of the good life and
Rejection letters, California dreams and clear reflections on writing in a collection that explores self-doubt
Searching for the self ⦠Joan Didion in 1981. Photograph: Janet Fries/Getty Images
Searching for the self ⦠Joan Didion in 1981. Photograph: Janet Fries/Getty Images
FrancescaWade
Fri 5 Mar 2021 04.00 EST
Last modified on Mon 8 Mar 2021 09.38 EST
In the first essay of this new volume of previously uncollected pieces, Joan Didion makes a case against newspapers. Too often, she argues, their reporting style rests on âa quite factitious â objectivityââ, which âlends the entire venture a mendacityâ by failing to make explicit the writerâs own particular set of influences and biases. Didion praises instead magazines that cultivate a personal voice, and which aim to impart character and atmosphere rather than straightforward information: âThey assume that the reader is a friend, that he is disturbed about something, and th
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
Reflections on the literary influence of Joan Didion. Art by Eleanor Curran.
February 22, 2021
My preschool years were spent in California, living atop a mountain covered by lush greenery and speckled with wild deer. The Terminator was Governor, Netflix was a small business that delivered DVDs, and strikingly unaware of the woes of the world, my greatest anxiety was of being eaten alive by the mountain lions that supposedly emerged in the dark of night. A ghostly version of California still reverberates through my bones, wraps my memories in a rose-tinted euphoria, and disguises itself as a lingering lilt masked by my now noticeably Australian accent. A place, seen through the eyes of a child, only half remembered. Everything was beautiful, golden and shimmering.
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