Joan Didion and the Always Apocalypse
Didion’s books seem to teeter over a precipice, seeing the rocks at the bottom and grimly awaiting the final push. However dire the current landscape may be, Didion sees it as a precursor instead of an end.
The White Album
The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Silence and the Self in Joan Didion’s Southern California Memoir
Joan Didion’s 1979 book of essays The White Album is not only a road trip through the gridded streets and indecisive canyons of Los Angeles County, but also a meditation on Southern California as a setting for self-discovery.
Daily Details Made Monumental
Exterior details lend themselves to the interior landscape of a character or narrator. What one chooses to notice, how one describes an object, says more about the speaker than it does about that thing. A character who spends a whole paragraph noticing someone’s unwashed, unkempt hair tells the reader that hygiene is an obsession. The…