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...
california childhood vermont
Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.
grieving impulse persons
There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.
world stage stuck
Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
landscape nostalgia homesick
There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
grief turns knows
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
writing thinking blue
Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
grammar
I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.
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.
trying inexplicable compulsion
any compulsion tries to justify itself.
outsiders ability manipulate
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
princess self rose
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one
trying narrative
What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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.