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...
grieving impulse persons
There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.
new-york adventure people
New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
trying narrative
What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
believe california ease
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
pain blessing illness
That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.
voice serious poetic
Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
commitment motherhood way
I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
wind weather imagination
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
new-york cities notion
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion ...
trying inexplicable compulsion
any compulsion tries to justify itself.
adults ethics
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
anything-worth-having
Anything worth having has its price.
notebook mother writing
My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.
writing leaving pieces
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.