“... kindly.’ It is so scrupulously disarming an intro that it is bound to put people who like Joan Didion very much on their guard. And it is alarmingly easy to fall into the language of the Martini ad when writing about Grace Paley – wry, dry tender, ironic etc. The snag is, her work has all these qualities: it is an added irony that, since the fin has come ...”

“... American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight ...”

“... I really knew I was in California, and I began to see among the commercial hieroglyphics what Joan Didion meant when she called these places ‘pyramids to the boom years’. On certain days, Didion is quite a nice accompaniment to one’s nervous system. When she was young and working for Vogue, she took a correspondence ...”

“... belt’, with eighty days a year of Stage One eye-stinging murk. In City of Quartz, he quoted Joan Didion, passing through on her way to a murder trial:The lemon groves are sunken, down a three or four-foot retaining wall, so that one looks directly into their dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare; the fallen eucalyptus bark ...”

“... At the same time big cities have a way of shrinking. In her essay about leaving New York Joan Didion tells a man she’ll take him to a party where he might meet some ‘new faces’, and he laughs at her. ‘It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces”, there had been 15 people in the room, and he had ...”

“... offer lazy journalists the opportunity to recite those famous lines from Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion, in which the Santa Anas drive the natives to homicide and apocalyptic fever. But just as one shouldn’t read Daphne du Maurier to understand the workings of nature in Cornwall, one shouldn’t read Chandler to fathom the phenomenology of weather and ...”

“... fares no better: most of what he writes is ‘trash, and lazily obsessive trash, too’. Joan Didion is suitably seared. Brian de Palma, the light-fingered flash trash movie brute who can’t even walk properly, is asked by the interviewer to explain ‘why his films make no sense’, not a sequitur in sight. Neither do Hitchcock’s, says the ...”

“... long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of ...”

“... writer is only a telephone.’Hilton Als, who has curated exhibitions inspired by Joan Didion and James Baldwin, has now created one about Rhys. Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World, recently on display at London’s Michael Werner Gallery, does not try to cover all Rhys’s glimmers in and out of vivacity. Nevertheless there is a spectral ...”

“... and Diary of a Mad Housewife. They were in the money and the awards, and they were married. Joan Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays (1970) came into view as a project. Rosenfeld didn’t much like the book or its numb heroine, Maria Wyeth, but she realised in any case that she was being dropped – Perry had another beloved in view. ...”

“... an oven and half the old-timers were falling asleep as I came in. I saw that Jean Stein and Joan Didion were deep in a conversation that could only be private, so I went over to the bar and had a whisky before approaching them. Joan Didion gave me her hand and she was so thin it felt like I was holding a butterfly. I ...”

“... here of the obfuscation of the Victorians, especially James; of the essays and novels of Joan Didion, which both forbid and implore the reader to bring his own version of the story to the events at hand; of the seemingly bland fare of Raymond Carver’s fiction, offered in full awareness that the reader will sit down at table with his own salt and ...”

“... write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a startling account of the collapse of Sixties idealism. No one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop ...”

“... is a hint of catastrophe, a sick glow beyond the usual smog, a touch of Nathanael West or Joan Didion. Though he is a believer to the end, Ruscha suggests that Los Angeles might be a mirage and California a myth – a façade about to crumble into the desert, a set about to liquefy into the ...”

“... is dedicated to a long list of supporters, including tempura, her gynaecologist and ‘the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not’.Babitz’s medium is the energy that comes from enthusiastically recommending, judging, doing something verboten. As a cure for a nervous breakdown, if you can’t afford ‘a Henry James one’, she prescribes ...”