Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didionis an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work...
mourning limits
Mourning has its place but also its limits.
beautiful las-vegas devotion
Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
grief turns knows
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
landscape nostalgia homesick
There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
underwater way wanted
I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
hands shoulders salute
Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.
character ideas talking
I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.
spring america people
It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.
writing feels
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
dies ifs
I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.
kind hysterical temper
I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
grammar
I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.
mean thinking agreement
The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.
children way interest
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.