The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t just a collection for hopeful writers or even for people who are young and unmoored. It’s for all people who have lost their sense of place
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Posts Tagged: Joan Didion
FUNNY WOMEN #97: The Whitest Album
It was a time in my life when I was frequently “tagged,” along with other Netizens who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works, but I tried to keep in touch.
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Diamonds and Rust #1: Nostalgia, Form and Noise
“We both know what memories can bring, they bring diamonds and rust.” –Joan Baez
...moreHappy Birthday, Joan Didion
Joan Didion’s 78th birthday is as good an excuse as any to revisit her conversation with Sheila Heti for the Believer.
The two talk about the performative aspects of writing, the confidence a writer has to claim, and Didion’s aborted oceanography career.
...moreDidion’s Places To Go
“Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can’t reach otherwise.”
Joan Didion’s conversation with Sheila Heti is now available in its entirety at The Believer.
...moreAppearing in Public
The Believer is teasing us with ongoing highlights of a conversation between Sheila Heti and Joan Didion before posting the interview in its entirety. In this snippet Didion discusses writing as performance.
...moreJoan Didion Film
A film on Joan Didion is being created by her nephew, actor and director Chris Dunne. In a clip from the film—which Dunne describes as an “audiobook for the eyes”—the author reads from Blue Nights.
...moreJoan Didion’s Position of Privilege
Matthew Specktor deconstructs Joan Didion’s new memoir, Blue Nights, over at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Specktor takes a hard look on Didion’s relationship to privilege:
Joan Didion On Blue Nights
“What she has written instead is a kind of biography of Joan Didion, and an elusive one at that. Like her novels, it’s more a work of accumulation than of argument, at the end of which Quintana the grown-up remains the enigma Didion must want her to be, while Didion is the woman revealed.
...moreWith Every New Edition, A New Schema of Labeling
With the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) due for publication in May 2013, the classification of mental disorders and the categorization of psychiatric definitions is yet again being reviewed, revised, and reworded.
...moreDidion and Diagnoses
“Diagnosis never seems to lead to a cure, Didion observes, only an enforced debility. But as with a psychiatric evaluation of herself conducted in 1968 […] Didion sees and reflects on the truths of the assessment even as she ponders it at arm’s length.”
Joan Didion’s forthcoming memoir, Blue Nights, explores the flexibility and arbitrary aspects of psychiatric diagnoses through the experience of her daughter’s struggle with an evolving diagnosis.
...moreWho’s the Narcissist?
Emily Gould may be the queen of oversharing—but you’re the one reading this review of her book.
...moreLiterary Fashionables: The Junky and The New Journalist
Today’s two Literary Fashionables traveled in distinct social settings at the time of their rise to literary fame. One moved with exiles, hustlers and runaways in Paris, Mexico and Tangier and wrote experimental fiction. The other moved to Vogue out of college, got married and would soon join a group of rising journalists, including Tom Wolfe and Hunter S.
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