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...
mean victory firsts
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
two flow firsts
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
firsts nonfiction pieces
Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.
understanding tea firsts
prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.
last selling somebody writers
That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out
finish good marriage school sentences thinking understand
I never had to finish sentences because he would finish them for me, ... I never got why. What was good for him was good for me. What was good for me was good for him. I don't understand what school of marriage they're thinking about.
crazy period specific sure time
I'm not sure I would have anyway, ... If I had been writing it at the time she died, that would have become part of it. It was about a specific period of going crazy and getting over it.
bit hits people
It's always something minor. Some bit of information. Some interesting development. I think it hits people forever.
happens people
This one is really fantastic, ... It's not about grieving. It's about what happens when people die.
except hardly thank
There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you,
assumed husband overcome shock
The shock of it was that this time, she had a lot of strength, ... Her husband and I assumed she'd overcome it.
changes dinner life sit
Life changes fast, ... Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
bad deceiving heard hysteria imperative join moral morality necessity ourselves pragmatic start thinking whine
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
argument begin bridge further occurred step taking
That's something we have to feel out. It occurred to me to begin with, as a way of taking it a step further, but there's another argument that the step further may be a bridge too far.