Joan Didion R.I.P.

[Betterread]

Didion was a national treasure and possibly the best American writer at the time of her death. Her writing style was clean and simple and was a perfect vehicle to explore the way Californians filtered the reality of American news through their own personal stories. Her essays on the Manson family, Altamont, the Santa Ana winds, and the Santa Monica Freeway broke through the materialistic California outer crust to reveal the special American zeal to reinvent ourselves in our own narratives. It is the source of our confidence and our anomie and her crucial early novel “play it as it lays” tells this story as well as “the great gatsby”. Later non fiction “year of magical thinking” and “blue nights” deals with the loss of family members, illness, grief, good and bad fortune and growing old in a powerful, specifically American form of description that was powerful and meaningful.
She is not just a writer about NY and California. Slouching toward Bethlehem (1968) and the White Album (1979) are great sets of cultural essays about life in America.