The Pink Hotel

Wayne Koestenbaum

  • The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion
    Flamingo, 227 pp, £15.99, January 1997, ISBN 0 00 224080 7

I began this feuilleton in a hotel room, the Hyatt Regency in Houston, Texas: a Didionesque locale. (Caryl Phillips once told me that he liked to write his books in faraway hotel rooms. I admire that. It brings to mind Janet Flanner at the Ritz and James Schuyler at the Chelsea.) Joan Didion has often noted transiency’s allure, a writer’s necessary alienation from fixed address. My favourite Didion passage of all time, from The White Album, typifies what I will call ‘hotel prose’:

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