He was always by her side, and always “a hothead”. A paradox defined her marriage to the writer John Gregory Dunne. There was also, Christopher Isherwood reported in his diary, a voice that she wielded as an “instrument of aggression”, and “the most thrilling medicine cabinet” – beside her own mother’s – that the film producer Julia Phillips had ever seen. Meanwhile, beady, small-boned Joan passed the time reflecting on the fact – or so it seemed to her – that nothing matters, and scratching away in the notebook she had been handed, at the age of five, to stop her “whining”.Īs a means of psychic survival – to keep the world from “eating her up”, in the words of the critic Alfred Kazin – she generated an array of defences and dependencies which are now part of Didion lore: the nicotine and nosebleeds, the sunglasses and sweet tooth. Her father drank and suffered breakdowns, her mother intoned the dirge-like motto, “what difference does it make?”, and Sacramento County unfolded its annual cycle of fire, flooding, wind and drought. Joan Didion – the author of three memoirs, two political travelogues, five novels, and now, with Let Me Tell You What I Mean, seven collections of essays – was born in northern California, in 1934.
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