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“... to interview and in some cases canonise her. Heti has been called the heir to Philip Roth, or to Joan Didion, and the literary equivalent of the filmmaker Lena Dunham or the songwriter Frank Ocean, who astonished the luridly heterosexual R’n’B scene last year by recording love songs addressed to his boyfriend. But what if she’d just prefer to be ...”

“... meditation and gets written up as a Muscovite avatar of a character out of Robert Stone or Joan Didion: Often silences fell between us. Much of the time I felt that she was not in my company at all, nor I in hers. She would close her eyes for long, still minutes, smiling crookedly … I don’t know how she conceived of me. She only fixed me with ...”

“... for anyone’s actions, including one’s own, seems about as antiquated as art nouveau. Joan Didion reminded us last year that when Dick Cheney shot a fellow hunter in the face his impulse was not to apologise or even ask how the chap was but to mix himself a drink.Diary of a Bad Year extends the idea of honour even beyond its explicit ...”

“... thinking is a disease, right?’ I asked my husband.‘Yes,’ he said sombrely. ‘Joan Didion had it.’He was busy performing his own rituals, which I found to be laughably basic – they mostly consisted of tipping the coffee guy next door two dollars on every order and growing an election beard. (Somewhat less basic: he had to work out ...”

“... of State. Both writers possessed an intuitive analytical cunning bordering on the shamanistic – Joan Didion as well. But there aren’t many Mailers or McCarthys or Didions haunting the marble lobbies these days, and in the absence of literary falconry and lightning perceptions the reportorial diligence and personal proximity of Andrew Kirtzman will ...”

“... record straight about ‘the diva myth that has followed me all my life’.She was born Barbara Joan Streisand in 1942 in Brooklyn. Her mother, Diana Rosen, was a gifted singer; Streisand never shook the feeling that her mother was jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the Catskills, and ...”

“... Journey to the Western Islands is an analytical commentary rather than a mere travel book – more Joan Didion than H.V. Morton. There is a good dose of irony in his analysis: ‘To hinder insurrection by driving away the people ... is an expedient that argues no great profundity of politicks ... it affords a legislator little self-applause to ...”

“... something yearning and tired. The rain stopped dry . . .’ There’s an occasional slip into Joan Didion glam-anomie: ‘She began to linger in juice bars,’ as you do, perhaps, if you’re an ageing movie starlet as imagined by an American woman writer; ‘she drank juice and, outside, smoked a cigarette now and then.’ A couple of closing moves ...”

“... genius v. mass culture mediocrity. Examples of the ‘HF’ include Gramsci, Rimbaud, Mozart, Joan of Arc and Simone Weil, with her ‘funny, short-sighted schoolgirl glasses’, her ‘foreign hospital bed … a harrowing maze of barbed wire’. And the piece that gives the book its title starts off with a transposition of the Crucifixion to the ...”

“... beheld the camera like a debauched cherub on the back jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms, and Joan Didion, posed against a Corvette Stingray in a long stately dress and sandals, was a chic postcard for California dreamin’. But Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose ...”

“... world’s dizzying fecundity. ‘John, you gotta come to my house. It’s just like New York,’ Joan Rivers gushed to me at a party that first week in Los Angeles. ‘I’ve got plants in my garden that die.’Late at night, when the sense of anticipation rendered me too excited to sleep, I would walk to the end of the road, inhaling the delectable ...”

“... And there is Hadrian’s Wall. And should I stop in Glasgow for a drink? If you read the novels of Joan Didion, you will see there can come a time in anybody’s life, women’s as much as men’s, when they climb into their car and feel that they are driving away from an entire kingdom of dependency. The motorways don’t offer a solution: they offer a ...”

“... perpetual sharp-elbowed jostle for the moral high ground. Looked at one way – in the manner of Joan Didion, for example, in her harsh, oddly clouded but startlingly acute essay of 1972 on the Women’s Movement – the idea of feminism is obviously Marxist, being about the ‘invention’, as Didion put it, ‘of ...”

“... leave, but by 1976 all their neighbours had gone and they were alone. Their nearest friends were Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. In her essay ‘Quiet Days in Malibu’, Didion described ‘the most idiosyncratic of beach communities, 27 miles of coastline with no hotel, no passable restaurant, nothing to attract ...”

“... to a sort of cool luminous reportage that reminds one of the work of our more storied essayists, Joan Didion or John McPhee. In the past few years the incidence of these big books has increased rapidly: three years ago, Christopher Bram published his Washington tale, Almost History; in 1994, Laura Argiri’s 19th-century melodrama The God in Flight came ...”