Joan Didion

 

The writer, Joan Didion died this week at age 87. I have loved her writing for several years. I am amazed that she was as old as she was, and that I was completely unaware of her personal life other than her two memoirs of grieving the losses of her husband and daughter. 

I especially enjoy seeing other writers express their sadness over her passing. I am grateful that I belong to that wonderful world of connections through words. 

"I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself," she writes of her preference for novels over short stories, and explains, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

“Because a sentence of Didion is unmistakable, people often presume that her advances were in prose style,” Nathan Heller wrote, earlier this year. “Didion worked hard at her sentences, and no magazine journalist has done better than her best. But style is just the baseline of good writing. Didion’s innovation was something else.”

from essays collected in Let Me Tell You What I Mean.

Nathan Heller via {the New Yorker}