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“... good novels unless they already have some bend in their imagination, as did Hemingway, Orwell and Joan Didion, towards self-excavation. The urge may hide itself, but you can see it in their language: the words don’t just arrive; they are bred in the bone and the actions they perform are specific to that writer. This is what we call style, and ...”

“... static. 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 ...”

“... she tells us, ‘I had a higher disapproval rating than any first lady of modern times.’ Joan Didion called her smile ‘a study in frozen insincerity’. Gloria Steinem called her ‘the marzipan wife’. The Chicago Tribune berated her in terms that could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the present Princess of Wales or to Marie ...”

“... looks. Being a woman writer is only partly a matter of how any writing woman subjectively feels. Joan Didion, interviewed in 1977, wittily evokes the ‘social tradition’ of male writers: Hard drinkers, bad livers. Wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. A man who wrote novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do ...”

“... of the global American imperium. Except for Jane and Paul Bowles in Morocco, only Robert Stone and Joan Didion suggest themselves, and neither of them is associated closely with any one setting. On the whole, American writers seem convinced that the vital features of their society are most clearly discernible at its centre, even though it is often on the ...”

“... of the day. A better, braver person might have accosted these men sober.’ She has the skill, a Joan Didion kind of skill, of inflecting non-fiction material subjectively, a habit of assessing situations via her nervous system.She listens to these workers while thinking about Caden. ‘My dream was of a chance meeting with people who knew him ...”

“... It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied ...”

“... about that petulant childishness, that refusal to look straight at painful realities, for which Joan Didion attacked ‘the women’s movement’ in her famous breaking-eggs essay of 1972. George Clinton’s ‘cryptic nonsense’ on that album is neither difficult to hear nor to understand: ‘Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time, for y’all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Several​ of the last century’s finest non-fiction writers – Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin – longed to be novelists. In interviews with the Paris Review, each touched on the tension and insecurity involved in their dual métier. Sontag wrote in surprisingly aspirational tones of ‘the novelist [I’d] finally given myself permission to be ...”

“... about the SLA with an alienating gracelessness and her story has been ‘querulously’ received (Joan Didion’s word) by American reviewers who felt that she hadn’t told the whole truth. It could simply be, however, that what happened to her, and her response to it, was more complicated than she is able now (or was old enough then) to deal ...”

“... and Ann Beattie (1947-). Heavy in the hand, the Companion makes for pretty light reading: Joan Didion is helpfully described as the author of ‘nonfictional works on contemporary life’; the ‘Beat movement’ as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ...”

“... on. She now namedrops Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station, Ikea’s Malm furniture, Joan Didion, Andrea Dworkin. But instead of truly getting the fuck out, or selling out, or moving far enough away to drop her pose, she has become a cog in the global branding cognoscenti. In Brooklyn, she wrote advertising copy, possibly for a class of ...”

“... it’s straight Florida you want, you’d probably still be better advised to read Carl Hiaasen or Joan Didion. Or Matthiessen or Conroy or Stevens. Or Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings or Zora Neale Hurston. Or the Master himself. The pieces (one doesn’t want to use the word stories here, or not always) are sometimes more fictionary (to use Tom Paulin’s ...”

“... pointing to the Weimar writers Joseph Roth and Siegfried Kracauer as well as modern exponents like Joan Didion. The book is artfully constructed but the virtues so apparent when Enzensberger writes in short form have not carried over to this longer work. Imagined conversations, for example, are – as Enzensberger says – a venerable literary form, and ...”