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“... leave, but by 1976 all their neighbours had gone and they were alone. Their nearest friends were Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. In her essay ‘Quiet Days in Malibu’, Didion described ‘the most idiosyncratic of beach communities, 27 miles of coastline with no hotel, no passable restaurant, nothing to attract ...”

“... to a sort of cool luminous reportage that reminds one of the work of our more storied essayists, Joan Didion or John McPhee. In the past few years the incidence of these big books has increased rapidly: three years ago, Christopher Bram published his Washington tale, Almost History; in 1994, Laura Argiri’s 19th-century melodrama The God in Flight came ...”

“... Gordon interviewed both him and his wife at length. ‘I thought her mother was crazy,’ Joan said, bluntly. ‘Her mother clung to Angela. She didn’t want Angie to grow up.’ A hanky was placed behind her head if she sat down in public. She wasn’t allowed to go to the lavatory on her own until she was ten or eleven. She later told a friend that ...”

“... writes that ‘during the years-long squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls’ – why? The answer is obvious: too sweaty. Wallace perspires freely in the foreground, while Paltrow perches mauve-and-beigely on her stool on a far stage. He is dead and ...”

“... 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. ...”

“... the formula (‘I test myself’ paired with an abstract noun) is repetitive. They bring to mind Joan Didion’s reservations about Franny and Zooey: for Didion, the recondite references Franny keeps dropping – she looks down on ‘all poets except Sappho’, and namechecks Manlius while sipping a martini – were ...”