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“... This is how it begins: July 26 2010. Today would be her wedding anniversary. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight ...”

“... Joan Didion is the poet of the Great Californian Emptiness. She sings of a land where it is easier to Dial-A-Devotion than to buy a book, where the freeway sniper feels ‘real bad’ about picking off a family of five, where kids in High Kindergarten are given LSD and peyote by their parents, where young hustlers get lethally carried away while rolling elderly film-stars, where six-foot-two drag queens shop for fishnet bikinis, where a 26-year-old woman can consign her five-year-old daughter to the centre divider of Interstate 5: when her fingers were prised loose from the fence 12 hours later, the child pointed out that she had run after the car containing her family for ‘a long time ...”

“... 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’: TO PACK AND ...”

“... its mode of reasoning. The premises are wild, but the logic is irresistible. This is what Joan Didion means when she writes, in her title and on the page, of ‘magical thinking’: ‘thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome’. She also calls it ‘disordered ...”

“... of that great trek westwards was perfect – art direction usually is. And now here comes Joan Didion, a little bit like the doomsayer on the wagon train (Walter Brennan, with teeth), but too arresting to be ignored, to tell us the prospectus, like the prospect, was a hoax. None of Joan Didion’s books has been ...”

“... for a destabilisation. And the whole Central American isthmus will be returned to – what? Joan Didion can tell us what, because she has visited a Salvadoran present which is also the future: neither the ‘front yard’ theory nor the new ‘grand design’ can do anything more than ensure that the misery and savagery of Central America will steadily ...”

“... Havana. There have been no less than five recent books on Miami, of which those by Rieff and Joan Didion,* quite different in tone and treatment, are the most prominent. Miami has also become crucial to the whole Central American drama, whether because it is where the Contras are headquartered, or because the drug and intelligence traffic has found it a ...”

“... The first thoughts​ about Joan Didion are not reasonable. The present literature about her is a hagiography that does not entirely trust itself; there is a vacancy at the centre of it that I call the ‘but surely’. But surely if these essays were published now, the hagiography says to itself at three in the morning, they would meet with a different reception? But surely if she wrote today, her ideas about feminism would be more in line with ours? But surely, for all her pointillism, she is failing to draw the conclusions we would most like to see? The hagiography turns the pillow over, looking for a cool spot ...”

“... the shadow of an old puzzle? This is the dilemma that confronts narrator and characters in Joan Didion’s Democracy, a novel whose title itself mimes the slippery problem. Democracy, in Didion’s work, is not a form of government but an item of rhetoric: what the world is to be made safe for; a conspiracy of empire ...”

“... it so heatedly. It’s instructive to compare-and-contrast Ozick’s approach with that of Joan Didion. Ozick is intensely suspicious of the aesthetic, but her essays are all about writers; Didion floats past on a bubble of style – her style is the first thing you notice about her, and you never stop noticing it – but ...”