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’:
You are not logged in
- If you have already registered then you can login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or university library please login here
- If you have an institutional print subscription without online access then you can find out about our institutional online subscriptions here
Vol. 19 No. 7 · 3 April 1997 » Wayne Koestenbaum » The Pink Hotel (print version)
pages 20-21 | 3072 words