Too long and negative.

If you like Joan Didion, you'll love this beautiful collection. With the exception of My Year of Magical Thinking, this book includes all of her nonfiction, including both essays and longer works. I enjoy turning to a favorite essay or chapter when I'm in the mood to be inspired.

just picked this up from the library. so far the introduction talks about her skill with words and her slightly dark wryness, but how the slightly dark wryness is also so spot on thru the decades.hmmm. it is a collection of her non-fiction over the years including: The White Album, Miami, Political Fictions, Where I Was From, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, etc.....It is a big book and makes me feel like Rory Gilmore when I read it on the light rail. ;)

JOAN DIDION (1934-2021)

This morning a real writer, a poet who wrote prose, died. I hope peacefully so, and not by herself, though lord knows. I would go to her funeral if it wasn’t so far away. Never met her in person, seen her on the page, on screen. I am a fan: who feels like a student of her work. She is someone whose advice I diligently follow. She elucidated an identifiable tone, a lens to perceive with. I, too, have typed up Hemingway’s sentences. I bought a mass market paperback of Conrad’s Victory. By speaking out about her process, she has validated my compulsion to re-type everything, to spend the time to get back into the rhythm of the sentences. Her way of being was to stay hungry and alert. I’ve read her work but cannot recall sentences: just images. If it doesn’t stick it is because it has gone directly to the unconscious. We were better off with her in the world. I’d rather think of the life of a writer when I’m not living it. She was an artist who photographed with words. She sketched as she sequenced, practicing the form again and again, accruing a certain patina before performing it once more, straight through. Her voice is there with me whenever I’m editing a piece. This ambiguous loss really feels like losing a loved one. I’m grieving for someone I never knew but knew existed. You know the feeling. She’s all I could think of today: the dominating presence. But fortunate for us she has left a body of work behind her. I’m not planning to return to it immediately. I wait until it feels right, feels necessary to plunge. I can only bring myself to forfeit my attention to what matters to me at any given moment. Form leads my decision making process more than content. I want language that fires up my brain, sends shivers up the spine. I adore those who are patient, and aren't afraid of assuming first-person singular. It all seems so simple to those who don’t actively do it. The true effect of her work is to give other writer’s courage. Stand where you are and say what you see with style. Replace thinking with thoughts that feel—what does that even mean? She wrote despite the nothingness, never against or with it. She worked alongside it, “as a journalist,” Mr. Als said. Every now and then a train flashed past and she caught a glimpse of it and found a way to make meaning out of history. She was what it looked like when introverts extroverted. She lived for the next; for the right word. She, someone who counted, was someone who counted. Long ago the flowers had been laid at her feet. I read her and thought, “Yes. This is how things are for me too. I thought we were supposed to repress all that. But here we are." Now, when I re-read, I shall see how it was. When a star dies there is a black hole in the sky. I open up the book to page one and begin. Every time one reads one resuscitates a consciousness. As long as we keep reading, her essence remains alive. As long as we are thinking we remain standing in line. There is a high chance each of us might see those who’ve come before us leave. This is a part of being a human being. She was and is and will be loved by strangers. She gave us something to know her by. Read her! Then become your own teacher. Don’t live to tell stories; underestimate a single instant; stop paying deep yet distant attention. Write, write, or die. Die having written. Some of us write in order to live. Forget about stories: think, goddammit, think! It’s all about the words—the following sentence, the mood of a single paragraph. She taught as that by example. Like no one else this past century, I think, it was Joan Didion who best understood the ambiguous assignment hovering over each writer’s head. Her work will endure.

As always, Ms. Didion is brilliant as she blithely cuts through the misconceptions on topics ranging from Old Hollywood and Los Angeles to Cuban-Miami-D.C. relations and the Contras. Her take on politics and how the democratic process has largely been destroyed and manipulated into something else entirely is must-reading. A quote to illustrate, "the moment in which the determination of the Republican party to maximize its traditional low-turnout advantage was perfectly matched by the determination of the Democratic Party to shed association with its traditional low-income base." Or this one, "people inside the process...speak of the world not as it is but as they want people out there to believe it...and to dismiss that which can be learned empirically as 'anecdotal.'" After reading Political Fictions, you will never look at the Super Tuesdays, conventions, Jesse Jackson, or Bill Clinton the same.

This book was LONG and took me nearly a full year to read but it was worth it. Everything was well-written. Some of these books and essays were better than others, mostly because of cultural references and my ability to understand and relate to them.

Boken får inte en femma pga att jag inte alltid hade tålamod med hennes långsamma berättarteknik och skippade helt sonika vissa noveller. Men hon är skarp, vetenskaplig och ögonöppnande. Essäer om människor och politik är intressanta, men jag hade önskat lite mer fördjupning i vissa.

Joan Didion is simply the supreme essayist of American literature. Updike and Vidal, to name two others, were great; Didion is the best. This 'Didion Bible', as I've taken to calling it, comprises 7 books that, taken as a whole, are a glittering testament to this woman's courage, wit, empathy, and exquisite writing talent. Included here is "Political Fictions" which contains the most clear-eyed writing about US politics that I have ever come across. We may not see its like again. #sad.

My tiered rankings of the works in the collection would go:

Top: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Where I Was From

Mid: Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions

Bottom: Salvador

Einmal so denken & schreiben können wie Joan Didion

exzellent

Joan Joan Joan! God the woman can write! Some of her essays get a little tiresome as she tries to shock, but you have to remember she was writing them back in the '70s.