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“... and Ann Beattie (1947-). Heavy in the hand, the Companion makes for pretty light reading: Joan Didion is helpfully described as the author of ‘nonfictional works on contemporary life’; the ‘Beat movement’ as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese ...”

“... She now namedrops Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station, Ikea’s Malm furniture, Joan Didion, Andrea Dworkin. But instead of truly getting the fuck out, or selling out, or moving far enough away to drop her pose, she has become a cog in the global branding cognoscenti. In Brooklyn, she wrote advertising copy, possibly for a class of people too ...”

“... straight Florida you want, you’d probably still be better advised to read Carl Hiaasen or Joan Didion. Or Matthiessen or Conroy or Stevens. Or Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings or Zora Neale Hurston. Or the Master himself. The pieces (one doesn’t want to use the word stories here, or not always) are sometimes more fictionary (to use Tom Paulin’s ...”

“... to the Weimar writers Joseph Roth and Siegfried Kracauer as well as modern exponents like Joan Didion. The book is artfully constructed but the virtues so apparent when Enzensberger writes in short form have not carried over to this longer work. Imagined conversations, for example, are – as Enzensberger says – a venerable literary form, and one he has ...”

“... over the age of 70: Vidal, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Arthur Schlesinger, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion among them. Jaundiced about American good intentions, unaffected by the roar of sentimentality after 9/11, they saw what armies of better informed, younger journalists couldn’t or refused to see. ‘The line between liberating the world and enslaving the ...”

“... 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 the ...”

“... 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 one of the ...”

“... 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 the ...”

“... 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 usages. The dogs ...”

“... 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 in the ...”

“... 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 have to ...”

“... the SLA with an alienating gracelessness and her story has been ‘querulously’ received (Joan Didion’s word) by American reviewers who felt that she hadn’t told the whole truth. It could simply be, however, that what happened to her, and her response to it, was more complicated than she is able now (or was old enough then) to deal with. Writing about ...”

“... 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 consider, that where ...”

“... 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 seem ...”

“... connection takes us somewhere dim, vulgar, rude, mysterious – underwater, maybe, as Joan Didion once suggested was true of the experience of all women, in their ‘deepest life’. Morante didn’t like feminists, according to Tuck: she liked ‘simple mothers, real mothers’, mothers like the uneducated rural teenagers her ‘lost boys’ long to ...”