A Book of Common Prayer, although it is Joan Didion's third novel, is a relatively early book (1977) for she is still working today in 2012. What I enjoy most about it is what I also loved about her later book Democracy : a distinctive style that orchestrates and shapes, using white space as sile...
It is perhaps significant that I purchased my copy of this book at the Vroman's bookstore on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. I loved the brief time I lived in California (though it was so short and so recent I doubt I even qualify as one of Didion's 'new people') and this seems like an almost tal...
Damn, so many of the reviews for this book are terrible. I kind of want to get a gazillion votes for this review just so that it will come before some of the nonsense in the other reviews. Any talk of post-modernism or meta-fiction or there being too many characters in this novel (there aren't ...
MARIA C’EST MOIOgni libro di Joan Didion che leggo è più bello del precedente, e sono tutti magnifici. Non è certo la trama che lo rende così grande, la storia è presto detta, è già sentita: giovane starlet di Hollywood precocemente sul viale del tramonto in preda a ennui, divide il suo tempo tra...
This classic collection of journalism defined the state of America during the upheaval of the sixties revolution. The essays feature barricades and bombings, mass murders and kidnapped heiresses.
If I had started with The White Album instead of Slouching Toward Bethlehem I might have been spared two years of blithely embarrassing myself with statements like: “Joan Didion? She’s ok.” Actually she’s amazing. The rhythms of her self-dramatization in Slouching were too arch for my taste, or p...
The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America's most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work...
Joan Didion is that rare thing: an American woman of letters whose pronouncements on that country’s way of life are considered to bear great weight. Journalist, essayist, novelist and columnist, her intelligent and perceptive observations have probed her nation’s psyche for three decades.In this...
I find Joan Didion to be a fascinating Essayist. And while I appreciate the melancholic, dry tone of Run, River, I don’t think this book did her writing justice. Then again, it was her debut novel. I’m going to go into detail as there’s a lot of that on here, but it’s not a face-value novel - I'd...
"Terror is the given of the place." The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror–its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy.As ash tr...
A few months after John died, in the late winter of 2004, after Beth Israel and Presbyterian but before UCLA, I was asked by Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books if I wanted him to submit my name for credentials to cover the Democratic and Republican summer conventions. I had looked at ...
All I know is that midway through June, after walking home with a friend after an early dinner on Third Avenue in the eighties, I found myself waking on the floor of my bedroom, left arm and forehead and both legs bleeding, unable to get up. It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory ...
You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive-time radio, you do an “event,” a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service, a...
It was not as easy for Freddy to fix as it might have been, because when they vacuumed the car they picked up marijuana, but still, by sundown, she was flying back across the desert with Freddy in a Lear he had borrowed from a client. Freddy had done everything. Freddy had driven out to the Malib...