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“... connection takes us somewhere dim, vulgar, rude, mysterious – underwater, maybe, as Joan Didion once suggested was true of the experience of all women, in their ‘deepest life’. Morante didn’t like feminists, according to Tuck: she liked ‘simple mothers, real mothers’, mothers like the uneducated rural teenagers her ‘lost boys’ long to ...”

“... is Hadrian’s Wall. And should I stop in Glasgow for a drink? If you read the novels of Joan Didion, you will see there can come a time in anybody’s life, women’s as much as men’s, when they climb into their car and feel that they are driving away from an entire kingdom of dependency. The motorways don’t offer a solution: they offer a welcome ...”

“... with his first major screen role, in The Panic in Needle Park, with a screenplay written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, in which Pacino played a sweet-faced but criminal young heroin addict called Bobby opposite Kitty Winn (a soft-voiced screen presence who won best actress at Cannes and quit the film business soon afterwards). Bregman was ...”

“... the spirit of Hollywood movie-making: not so much a collaboration as an armed conflict, as Joan Didion once said, ‘where one antagonist has a contract assuring him of nuclear capability’. In my case, 20th Century Fox in its wisdom didn’t want to give me credit for the novel I’d written and which I was now being paid to adapt. The boilerplate was a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 she is ...”

“... that Carter was often vehement in her dislike of slightly older women writers, such as Joan Didion, Edna O’Brien and Jean Rhys, whom she claimed to find victim-like. Such women also, one can’t help but notice, had the fragile slightness her mother had but she didn’t, in their bodies and in their works. Even after giving birth herself, Ward Jouve ...”