Friday, December 06, 2013

Why Do We Celebrate Joan Didion's Personal Essays More Than Her Other Writing?

By Kevin Pires on

Why Do We Celebrate Joan Didion's Personal Essays More Than Her Other Writing?
Today is Joan Didion’s 79th birthday and also a day closer to the end of a year that was characterized by the resurgence of a narrative that she gave birth to: the “Goodbye to All That” essay, the it’s-time-to-leave-New York story. The glut of these essays is as much a marker of Didion’s popular beatification as of the impossibility of living in New York. 
This is not to say that making a saint of Sacramento’s daughter is undeserved, but rather that in privileging a minute part of her oeuvre, we have forgotten the, often better, rest. The popular imagination holds Didion as an “I-writer,” one whose personal ruminations offer the rest of us prescriptions for our own lives. … Read More

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