joan didion quotes about californiaBlog

joan didion quotes about california

My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as “Joan’s husband.” Marriage is the classic betrayal.Those are the sorts of sentences and paragraphs that made me love Didion — the development of facts, family conversations, images of the land, and the occasional experiential detail (of writing “D-U-S-T” in the dust of old homes), concluding with that perfect line about marriage being “the classic betrayal” of one’s original family. Joan Didion can't quit being so awesome. Each paragraph led through a series of strangely coordinated little facts and observations until landing at one of those always-surprising, always-inevitable last lines that made you rethink the entire paragraph. Four books from our series and imprints + limited-edition tote + all the perks of the digital membership.

Didion gathers these disconnected, postmodern snippets under an umbrella title suggesting demonic forces shambling apocalyptically through outdoor “happenings,” college demonstrations, and Janis Joplin concerts — which seems like a frivolous misuse of demonic forces.At one point, like a Pynchon character catching a whiff of some deep conspiracy, she goes looking for a local figure named Chester Anderson. Joan Didion is from Sacramento, and so is Greta Gerwig—the idiosyncratic star releasing her excellent solo directorial debut, Lady Bird, this weekend. Joan Didion went to San Francisco to follow the trial, but this pushed her into examining her thoughts about California. Four LARB-selected books + access to conversation on each book with LARB editors + all the perks of the print membership. - Joan Didion quotes from BrainyQuote.com "It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. When my high school English teacher, Mr. Holden, gave me a battered old digest-sized copy of In addition to those great sweeping romantic writerly dreams (how could you There were, of course, other great California writers — from Steinbeck and Saroyan, to Leigh Brackett and Jack Vance, to Ross Macdonald, John Fante, and Bukowski (who didn’t prove enjoyable until I read him in my late 40s for a review); but none of them — writing about the Salinas Valley, say, or describing the complicated Oedipean family histories of California’s upper crust — made me feel that their territories were Which is probably why Joan Didion was one of most significant writers of my youth; and while I never read her as devotedly as some of my favorite writers (Richard Yates, Brian Moore, Simenon, Chekhov), she quickly established a sense of fictional identity that was far more firm to me and, in weird way, comforting, than that of just about any other writer I ever read.For good or bad, I can’t imagine my young adult life without Joan Didion in it.It’s not easy to recall when and where I first read Didion — even though I distinctly recall the first time I picked up and read Richard Yates (a mass market paperback of From her first pages, Didion spoke like someone with a brain who wasn’t quite ashamed of her California-ness, but who was probably just ashamed enough. I know at least a few writers who in the last couple weeks started reading her stuff, and have been affected by it.

For all her intelligence and clarity, there’s something too apparent of the Goldwater-voting sorority girl in these essays, as if Didion didn’t observe the world so much as take notes for an ass-kicking later. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Just retyping these sentences reminds me how, when I first read them, Didion knew more about my life than I did. In these longer, moodier pieces, Didion announced the “death of the sixties” at almost every opportunity, until the ’60s were already long gone. Nov 8, 2018 - Explore scottiesox's board "Didion" on Pinterest. And despite her caustic, slightly bemused tone, Didion never sounded cruel or disrespectful. Scott Bradfield reviews the Library of America edition of Joan Didion’s early novels and essays. Joan Didion said it best, "California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent." And the way she expressed these ideas in sharp, dispassionate, funny sentences continually intrigued me, as if she weren’t communicating truths so much as establishing a shared experience. If I were to sum up my complicated feelings about a complicated writer I have long admired, I would simply say this: more than any California writer I can think of, she made me feel at home. And yet, at the same time, how “nice.”This sense of mutual duplicity, shared by observer and observed, is one of the things that makes Didion’s best essays remarkable. She wrote about places, people, and activities that were part of my world — watching monster movies, listening to Jim Morrison and the Doors, walking along Romaine Street in L.A. (where my Aunt Jean had lived for decades in an overpriced little one-bedroom apartment not far from Howard Hughes) or the Haight District (where I often hung out with friends); she wrote about Morro Bay, John Wayne, Joan Baez, and Patty Hearst (the SLA abandoned one of their cars around the block from us in Daly City, and I often, when going to used bookstores, walked past the bank where the beret-wearing “Tania” first appeared).

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