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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons

In a classic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Goodbye to All That,” the novelist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her reader. She rhetorically asks and answers: “…was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” The wry little moment is perfectly indicative of Didion’s unsparingly ironic critical voice. Didion is a consummate critic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always foremost a judge of herself. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first novel while working for Vogue , “Goodbye to All That” frequently shifts point of view as Didion examines the truth of each statement, her prose moving seamlessly from deliberation to commentary, annotation, aside, and aphorism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

Anyone who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-altering city—will know the pangs of resignation Didion captures. These economic times and every other produce many such stories. But Didion made something entirely new of familiar sentiments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a collection of breakup letters to New York with the same title, the unsentimental precision and compactness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a representative text of the literary nonfiction of the sixties alongside the work of John McPhee, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. In Didion’s case, the emphasis must be decidedly on the literary —her essays are as skillfully and imaginatively written as her fiction and in close conversation with their authorial forebears. “Goodbye to All That” takes its title from an earlier memoir, poet and critic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leaving his hometown in England to fight in World War I. Didion’s appropriation of the title shows in part an ironic undercutting of the memoir as a serious piece of writing.

And yet she is perhaps best known for her work in the genre. Published almost fifty years after Slouching Towards Bethlehem , her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faithful account” of the stunningly sudden and crushing personal calamities that claimed the lives of her husband and daughter separately. “Though the material is literally terrible,” Pinsky writes, “the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative: a forced expedition into those ‘cliffs of fall’ identified by Hopkins.” He refers to lines by the gifted Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that Didion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The nearly unimpeachably authoritative ethos of Didion’s voice convinces us that she can fearlessly traverse a wild inner landscape most of us trivialize, “hold cheap,” or cannot fathom. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review interview , Didion—with that technical sleight of hand that is her casual mastery—called herself “a kind of apprentice plumber of fiction, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of archetype of literary modesty (John Locke, for example, called himself an “underlabourer” of knowledge) while also figuring herself as the winsome heroine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jennifer Jones, a character who learns to thumb her nose at power and privilege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Linda Kuehl’s death—meant that Didion wrote her own introduction to the Paris Review interview, a very unusual occurrence that allows her to assume the role of her own interpreter, offering ironic prefatory remarks on her self-understanding. After the introduction, it’s difficult not to read the interview as a self-interrogation. Asked about her characterization of writing as a “hostile act” against readers, Didion says, “Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.”

It’s a curious statement. Didion’s cutting wit and fearless vulnerability take in seemingly all—the expanses of her inner world and political scandals and geopolitical intrigues of the outer, which she has dissected for the better part of half a century. Below, we have assembled a selection of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album brought together some of her most trenchant and searching essays about her immersion in the counterculture, and the ideological fault lines of the late sixties and seventies. The title essay begins with a gemlike sentence that became the title of a collection of her first seven volumes of nonfiction : “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Read two essays from that collection below:

“ The Women’s Movement ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Didion has maintained a vigorous presence at the New York Review of Books since the late seventies, writing primarily on politics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insider Baseball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History ” (2003)

“ Politics in the New Normal America ” (2004)

“ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ” (2005)

“ The Deferential Spirit ” (2013)

“ California Notes ” (2016)

Didion continues to write with as much style and sensitivity as she did in her first collection, her voice refined by a lifetime of experience in self-examination and piercing critical appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she published an autobiographical essay there that returns to the theme of “yearning for a glamorous, grown up life” that she explored in “Goodbye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glasses ,” Didion’s gaze is steadier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tempered and hardened by New York, but on herself as a child “determined to bypass childhood” and emerge as a poised, self-confident 24-year old sophisticate—the perfect New Yorker she never became.

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Joan Didion

Exploring a new journalism icon.

On Morality

Didion opens her essay, “ On Morality ,” by immediately letting the reader know that she is writing from her own perspective.

“As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119°. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I have been trying to think, because “The American Scholar” asked me to, in some abstract way about “morality,” a word I distrust more every day, but my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular.”

Didion is not even pretending to be transparent. The reader is being introduced to an experience through the lens of the writer, a theme central to her expressions in New Journalism. This approach to writing is central in many of her narrative, nonfiction works.

She is voicing an expression of her dismay with the concept of morality in terms of the social standards it creates. In her tone there is deep concern towards the context and frequency with which the word is often used. This is one of her more blunt assertions of her opinions on the social climate of her time as she maintains a position of distrust and concern for the American society.

As a way of making commentary on the state of the government, she says:

“Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and this is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.”

This piece, written in 1965, was perhaps a reflection of thoughts revolving around the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement and increasing political activism. The U.S. social climate had been uplifted as a result of the victory of World War II and thousands of people had turned their attention to racial injustice, rampant materialism and protests on America’s shortcomings in Vietnam.

Didion understood that the individual is shaped by their surroundings; that we are products of those things which we are subject to.

She was moved by the revolutionary changes in thinking, mindsets that had been shifting continuously since World War II. Not only that, but the war in Vietnam and the fear of communism was resting heavy on the shoulders of the United States.

It seemed that trusting your neighbor was not a common act and second-guessing the lifestyles of those around you was the norm. There was terror in the eyes of American people who believed Communism was going to take over, and with that terror came an overwhelming sense of “right” and “wrong.”

Didion, from an outsider’s perspective, saw this plight and understood that having a strong sense of morality does not, will not and cannot “save” the world. It can only give each person justification for their decisions.

On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue

By Joan Didion

Joan Didion , author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

Image may contain Book Text Page Paper and Newspaper

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Joan Didion

To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."

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In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: "Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it." Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, "fortunately for us," hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnée.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no rôle too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Didion on Self-Respect

By maria popova.

From her 1968 essay anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem ( public library ) comes “On Self Respect” — a magnificent meditation on what it means to live well in one’s soul, touching on previously explored inadequate externalities like prestige , approval , and conventions of success .

Joan Didion with her typewriter in Brentwood, 1988 (Photograph: Nancy Ellison)

Didion writes:

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without. To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. […] Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs. Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. […] Self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower. […] To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us. It is the phenomenon sometimes called ‘alienation from self.’ In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a superb read in its entirety. Also from it, Didion on keeping a notebook and not mistaking self-righteousness for morality .

— Published May 21, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/05/21/joan-didion-on-self-respect/ —

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Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion review – elegant essays spanning four decades

Rejection letters, California dreams and clear reflections on writing in a collection that explores self-doubt

I n the first essay of this new volume of previously uncollected pieces, Joan Didion makes a case against newspapers. Too often, she argues, their reporting style rests on “a quite factitious ‘ objectivity’”, which “lends the entire venture a mendacity” by failing to make explicit the writer’s own particular set of influences and biases. Didion praises instead magazines that cultivate a personal voice, and which aim to impart character and atmosphere rather than straightforward information: “They assume that the reader is a friend, that he is disturbed about something, and that he will understand if they talk to him straight; this assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable cogency of style.” Often, she concludes, the real story is “the story not in the newspaper”.

This could be read as a slanted manifesto for Didion’s own style. Across her 60-year career, from her landmark essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), through her formally innovative novels, to her devastating 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking , Didion has established a way of narration that focuses not so much on events as on subtexts, atmospheres and perceptions. She is usually present in her essays as a voice rather than a character, observer rather than participant – though the boundaries regularly blur. Yet even when she’s not saying directly what she’s feeling, it’s there in the architecture of every cool, clear sentence, in the sounds, gestures and images on which she chooses to focus her attention.

At university, Didion writes here in mock self-deprecation, “I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor”. Half of the 12 essays in this collection were written for the Saturday Evening Post in the late 1960s, while the latest is from 2000; in them we see Didion exploring the possibility of that attention to detail, working out who exactly the “I” in her writing is, and what it is she’s seeing.

Didion’s essay collections have always included overtly personal moments – “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,” she writes in “In the Islands” from The White Book , adding: “I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind.” This new collection contains several pieces of relatively straight autobiography: a funny essay describing the pain of her rejection from Stanford and subsequent summer spent “in sullen but mild rebellion” (“On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice”); “Telling Stories”, which describes how out of place the 19-year-old Didion felt in the writers’ workshop she took for a semester in 1954, attempting to remain inconspicuous by shrinking into her raincoat while others regaled the group with experiences that seemed far more redolent of the “writer’s life” – international, glamorous, drug-induced – than anything Didion had known growing up in Sacramento. (She went on to take a job composing advertising copy for Vogue, which she credits with teaching her to write.) The same essay includes a ream of rejection letters for an early short story widely condemned as too depressing: “I’m sorry,” wrote a representative of Good Housekeeping magazine, “we are seldom inclined to give our readers this bad a time.”

But the pieces most revealing of Didion’s self are those that discuss the act of writing itself. In “Why I Write” (1976) Didion directly confronts the question of the first person – of what it means for a writer to assume an identity on the page and a relationship with an invisible reader. “In many ways,” she observes, “writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind .” In another essay, on Hemingway’s style, she parses precisely how the very grammar of his sentences reveal “a certain way of looking at the world”: Didion too has a specific way of looking that binds together all her work, whether she’s watching Nancy Reagan pretend to pick flowers for a photoshoot, attending a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous or a reunion of airforce veterans in a Las Vegas hospitality suite, or parsing the mission statement of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia LLC. Didion writes of “needing room in which to play with what I did not understand”. Her pieces often feel ambiguous, even ambivalent, and her detachment can at times be bemusing: the reader is left wondering where her stake is grounded in the stories she tells. Yet her particular skill lies in asking questions too far-reaching to be contained on the page, that reverberate far beyond the essay, as her images lodge themselves in the reader’s conscience.

The collection – expansively introduced by Hilton Als – touches on many of the themes that run through Didion’s work: the power of illusion, which she learned about at Vogue and later in Hollywood; the unspoken dynamics of makeshift, often precarious communities; the dangerous thrill of pursuing dreams. Recalling San Simeon, the castle on a hill in California which she would glimpse from the highway as a child, she reflects on the impact of knowing that just beyond reach lay this opulent paradise of shimmering turrets and battlements. “San Simeon,” she writes, “was an imaginative idea that affected me, shaped my own imagination in the way that all children are shaped by the actual and emotional geography of the place in which they grow up, by the stories they are told and the stories they invent.” There’s an echo here of Didion’s most famous line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In that essay – “The White Album” – Didion describes a period between 1966 and 1971 when she “I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself”. Let Me Tell You What I Mean , its chapters largely rooted in this discombobulating period, is a valuable addition to the literature of self-doubt and self-awareness, an elegant untangling of what and why we remember and forget.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion: an Analysis of Her Writings on Morality

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Self-examination and morality, influence of environment and society, language and morality, power and morality, ethical inquiry and morality.

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The Courage of Our Mistakes – Joan Didion on Self-Respect and Moral Nerve

Pe ople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. – Joan Didion Tweet

Joan Didion was a Californian-born journalist and author who passed away this week. Her writing centered around the fringes of culture and was incisively honest. In this excerpt from a 1961 essay titled On Self-Respect, Didion argued for a morally robust state of being and looked back a generation to a value that was once called ‘character’. ‘ Self-respect ‘, she wrote, is ‘a discipline, a habit of mind that cannot be faked.’ She added that, ‘to have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.’

To do without self-respect is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves , seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.”

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

“ To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. “

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnée .

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

“ To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. “

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Didion (1934-2021) From: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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Joan Didion: Why I Write

"i write entirely to find out what i’m thinking, what i’m looking at, what i see and what it means.".

Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind . It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the Bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the Bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas—I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in The Portrait of a Lady as well as the next person, “imagery” being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention—but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of Paradise Lost , to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost , the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.

Just as I meant “shimmer” literally I mean “grammar” literally. Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene:

It tells you.

You don’t tell it.

Let me show you what I mean by pictures in the mind. I began Play It as It Lays just as I have begun each of my novels, with no notion of “character” or “plot” or even “incident.” I had only two pictures in my mind, more about which later, and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space. This was clearly the picture that dictated the narrative intention of the book—a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a “white” book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams—and yet this picture told me no “story,” suggested no situation. The second picture did. This second picture was of something actually witnessed. A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. She crosses the casino alone and picks up a house telephone. I watch her because I have heard her paged, and recognize her name: she is a minor actress I see around Los Angeles from time to time, in places like Jax and once in a gynecologist’s office in the Beverly Hills Clinic, but have never met. I know nothing about her. Who is paging her? Why is she here to be paged? How exactly did she come to this? It was precisely this moment in Las Vegas that made Play It as It Lays begin to tell itself to me, but the moment appears in the novel only obliquely, in a chapter which begins:

Maria made a list of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.

That is the beginning of the chapter and that is also the end of the chapter, which may suggest what I meant by “white space.”

I recall having a number of pictures in my mind when I began the novel I just finished, A Book of Common Prayer . As a matter of fact one of these pictures was of that Bevatron I mentioned, although I would be hard put to tell you a story in which nuclear energy figures. Another was a newspaper photograph of a hijacked 707 burning on the desert in the Middle East. Another was the night view from a room in which I once spent a week with paratyphoid, a hotel room on the Colombian coast. My husband and I seemed to be on the Colombian coast representing the United States of America at a film festival (I recall invoking the name Jack Valenti a lot, as if its reiteration could make me well), and it was a bad place to have fever, not only because my indisposition offended our hosts but because every night in this hotel the generator failed. The lights went out. The elevator stopped. My husband would go to the event of the evening and make excuses for me and I would stay alone in this hotel room, in the dark. I remember standing at the window trying to call Bogotá (the telephone seemed to work on the same principle as the generator) and watching the night wind come up and wondering what I was doing eleven degrees off the equator with a fever of 103. The view from that window definitely figures in A Book of Common Prayer , as does the burning 707, and yet none of these pictures told me the story I needed.

The picture that did, the picture that shimmered and made these other images coalesce, was of the Panama airport at 6 am. I was in this airport only once, on a plane to Bogotá that stopped for an hour to refuel, but the way it looked that morning remained superimposed on everything I saw until the day I finished A Book of Common Prayer . I lived in that airport for several years. I can still feel the hot air when I step off the plane, can see the heat already rising off the tarmac at 6:00 a.m. I can feel the skirt damp and wrinkled on my legs. I can feel the asphalt stick to my sandals. I remember the big tail of a Pan American plane floating motionless down at the end of the tarmac. I remember the sound of a slot machine in the waiting room. I could tell you that I remember a particular woman in the airport, an American woman, a norteamericana , a thin norteamericana about forty who wore a big square emerald in lieu of a wedding ring, but there was no such woman there.

I put this woman in the airport later. I made this woman up, just as I later made up a country to put the airport in, and a family to run the country. This woman in the airport is neither catching a plane nor meeting one. She is ordering tea in the airport coffee shop. In fact she is not simply “ordering” tea but insisting that the water be boiled, in front of her, for twenty minutes. Why is this woman in this airport? Why is she going nowhere, where has she been? Where did she get that big emerald? What derangement, or disassociation, makes her believe that her will to see the water boiled can possibly prevail?

She had been going to one airport or another for four months, one could see it, looking at the visas on her passport. All those airports where Charlotte Douglas’s passport had been stamped would have looked alike. Sometimes the sign on the tower would say “BIENVENIDOS” and sometimes the sign on the tower would say “BIENVENUE,” some places were wet and hot and others were dry and hot, but at each of these airports the pastel concrete walls would rust and stain and the swamp off the runway would be littered with the fuselages of cannibalized Fairchild F-227s and the water would need boiling.

I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not. I knew about airports.

These lines appear about halfway through A Book of Common Prayer , but I wrote them during the second week I worked on the book, long before I had any idea where Charlotte Douglas had been or why she went to airports. Until I wrote these lines I had no character called Victor in mind: the necessity for mentioning a name, and the name Victor, occurred to me as I wrote the sentence. I knew why Charlotte went to the airport sounded incomplete. I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not carried a little more narrative drive. Most important of all, until I wrote these lines I did not know who “I” was, who was telling the story. I had intended until that moment that the “I” be no more than the voice of the author, a nineteenth-century omniscient narrator. But there it was:

“I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not.”

“I knew about airports.”

This “I” was the voice of no author in my house. This “I” was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went to the airport but also knew someone called Victor. Who was Victor? Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion. Copyright © 2021 by Joan Didion. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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Part 1, Essay 1

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Part 2, Essays 9-11

Part 2, Essays 12-13

Part 3, Essays 14-15

Part 3, Essays 16-20

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Part 2, Essays 12-13 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “personals”, part 2, essay 12 summary: “on morality”.

Didion is in a Death Valley motel on a 119° day trying to write a piece on morality for The American Scholar . She distrusts morality as an overarching concept and is more interested in its particulars, which she explains via an accident on the previous night. A car turned over on the highway, and the driver was killed instantly, leaving his girlfriend in shock and bleeding internally. Didion speaks to the nurse who drove the woman to the nearest doctor 185 miles away. The nurse explains to Didion that her husband stayed behind with the body because to do otherwise would be immoral.

Didion trusts this notion of morality because of its specificity. A body left alone will be eaten by coyotes, and preventing that is part of the promise we make as a society. Didion calls this “wagon-train morality,” a term which is sometimes used in the pejorative. She turns to two famous tragedies—the Donner party and the Jayhawkers—saying that she was taught that these people died in the wilderness because they had failed in their responsibility to each other. Didion thinks this kind of morality is the only kind that has real meaning.

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Critique: On Morality by Joan Didion

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Leigh Gilmore

Excerpt: "The comparison between Didion's grief memoirs and a social justice movement forged in protest to racist killings and the failure to hold police accountable for them is hardly plain. But it has to do with how the terrible repetition of successive deaths registers personal pain for the white family, who may invoke a zone of privacy in which to grieve and carry that privacy with them in public, as it exposes black families to the ongoing vulnerability of actual risk, extensive legal proceedings, and their unjust denouements. Didion's oversized sunglasses emblematize her access to white privacy—they are a visor behind which she can veil her gaze and deflect the gaze of others. The succession of black deaths enacts the spectacle of the disrespect for the lives and bodies of black families, for whom neither privacy nor access to public grieving is secure. The acknowledgement of privacy's unequal distribution propels us to ask new questions about the relation between grief and racism in literary, political, and cultural spaces."

Linda K. Kadota

Joan Didion’s highly distinct non-fiction writing style has cemented her reputation as one of America’s finest living prose stylists. This essay analyzes her use, or lack of use, of transition devices throughout her essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” in order to depict events, places, and persons of the 1960s with a social as well as a philosophical concern.

Frank Harbers, Ilja van de Broek and Marcel Broersma eds. (2016). Witnessing the Sixties. A Decade of Change in Journalism and Literature. Leuven: Peeters

Ilja Van den Broek

Orji Onyebuchi Innocent

from The Centrality of Style Edited by Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri

Crystal N Fodrey

This chapter makes the following argument: Undergraduates studying essayistic composing—especially those at the beginner or intermediate level—can benefit from stylistic instruction just as other composition students can. Regardless of whether a creative nonfiction course is housed in composition or creative writing, style study in such courses has the potential to demystify what makes flash essays, travel memoirs, literary journalism, nature writing, and so on, different from the more traditional forms of academic writing to which they are accustomed. Teaching the importance of style analysis and production helps students new to the genre of creative nonfiction understand what it means when they are asked to write in an open, identification-seeking, literary way.

Orbit: A Journal of American Literature

Sam Diamond

Many contemporary readings of Joan Didion, not to mention her public profile, present her early journalism as her crowning achievement. Works such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are venerated as definitive Didion texts. However, Didion's work, in particular her journalism and memoir, underwent a radical change following these texts. This change can be witnessed in the transformation of Didion's style and politics between Slouching Towards Bethlehem and her later work, which often appeared in the New York Review of Books under the editorial guidance of the late Robert B. Silvers. This article tracks this change, identifying Didion's move away from surety and an objective voice towards ambivalence, subjectivity and nuance in search of a specific ideal of truth. I argue that the development of Didion's style, both aesthetic and poetic, reflects a political evolution and a reconstitution of what it might mean to approach truth on a personal and journalistic level, and this has a particular resonance given present conversations around truth in journalism and politics.

The Essay Review

Francesca Rendle-Short

Drawing is a common language beyond dialect, idiom, parlance, vernacular, or idiolect. It is like music. It touches us in the same way poetry touches us. It expresses the inexpressible, that which is seen and unseen, ineffable, that about which we dream, that which we long for. To draw is to yearn. "Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place thing and to place oneself" (Berger 150). When we write, we draw. When we draw, we write. Draw what you see. I instruct them. Draw what is in front of you. [...] So here we are, dancing. Hairs. On. End. The purpose of The Essay Review is to recognize the poetic, academic, social, and existential achievements of the nonfiction essay. It is one of the only journals in existence that is dedicated solely to literary criticism of the nonfiction essay.

Carolyne Lee

Episode 159 "Ripley, Hitchens, and Didion‪"‬ There Will Be Books

This week we're reviewing the latest Ripley adaptation, and discussing two essays from prominent 20th century writers. We begin by discussing a short bookish essay by Christopher Hitchens and then review Joan Didion's essay on John Wayne. And lastly, we heap all kinds of praise on the Ripley series debuting on Netflix. Fun episode for everybody. Enjoy! Contact Us: Instagram @therewillbbooks Twitter @therewillbbooks Email [email protected] Goodreads: Therewillbebooks ko-fi.com/therewillbbooks patreon.com/therewillbbooks

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Peter Murphy

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College students are behaving like students. The adults are behaving horribly.

In the chaos of the past few weeks, as adults across so many disciplines have reacted to student protesters with suspensions, zip ties, violent police raids, arrests and worse, it seems everyone has forgotten something very elemental about university students: They are raw idealists. Which means they can be inspiring, thoughtful and creatively engaged. But they can also be hellish, self-serving and terrifyingly shrewd. Trust me, I should know: From 2016 to 2018, I edited dispatches by college kids for the New York Times opinion section for a column called On Campus.

College kids—they protest. A lot. Like, usually around every big election cycle, but about all kinds of issues, big and small. And guess what? They should!

Students are supposed to be volatile and passionate—they’re the new members of our society who shake the comfortable cages adults inhabit to say “THIS ISN’T SITTING WELL WITH ME.” They are, by definition, in learning environments where they are meant to probe the biggest moral issues of our time through the lens of history or policy or science or art. And they have … so much more energy than we do.

Their methods are not perfect, by any means. Student protesters are messy, petty, and prone to fads—like all of us. But there is nothing surprising or particularly unique about the waves of protests and encampments right now. Young people are seeing something brutal and they are freaking out about it, with and without nuance. This is where they are. This is, quite frankly, where they should be in this moment, as they are opening their eyes to what that world actually contains.

WE are the adults, not them. And unfortunately, as campuses around the country continue to explode—as over 2,000 campus demonstrators have been arrested, some incredibly violently—we are proving again and again that we are not up to the task. College presidents immediately escalating the protests by calling the cops to remove students from their own quads? Honestly, grow up. David Axelrod spreading the idea that students can’t care enough about the war in Gaza to lead these protests, that those who’ve blockaded themselves in a campus building—one with a long history of student occupation—were led by outside agitators? Grow up. Police raising the American flag at City College in Manhattan as if they had conquered some sort of break-away county in a civil war? GROW UP. The people making fun of students asking for vegan and gluten free food in their encampments ? God, just grow up! Students protesting war is the most natural thing in the whole world, and we shouldn’t be surprised they don’t use the most precise language or the politest actions to communicate what is essentially a primal scream.

Some students have said and done things that are quite ugly and veered into bigotry—against Jews and Muslims alike. But most students do not actually understand how everything works (who does?), which can make them illiberal-sounding, uninformed about the weight of their words or just, well, annoying. Joan Didion does some delightfully bitchy skewering of student protesters in The White Album , writing about the kids at San Francisco State College in 1968 who—during the fiery protests against racism and the Vietnam War that swept college campuses in that era—call a press conference after days of raucous demonstrations only to realize that the problem with press conferences is “that the press asked questions.”

“Two hours and several dozen hand votes later, the group had selected four members to tell the press who owned the media,” Didion notes dryly, going on to accuse the students and professors of “industrious self-delusion” and “unconsciously collaborating on a wishful fantasy (Revolution on Campus) and playing it out in time for the six o’clock news.”

I’ve been thinking about this masterful ethering while watching everyone and their mother moralize over—or, really, dunk on—the Columbia student who, representing those occupying a campus building, asked for food and water and referred to it as “humanitarian aid.” Many have called the video in which she says this offensive, others have called for the student to face difficulty landing internships going forward (which … really? Grow up!).

The writer Eve Barlow tagged the United Nations and tweeted: “Can we please get an airdrop at Columbia University? We need 900 Acai bowls, 1300 Impossible Burgers on gluten free bread with sugar free vegan ketchup and 3000 bottles of pH 9.0 electrolyte water. This is urgent.”

David Frum of the Atlantic tweeted: “The revolution will be catered.”

OK, yes, it’s a little funny. But the glee with which grown adults have jumped on the imprecision of students’ words as a way to undercut the “cause” is damaging to their futures and frankly, lame. What are we saying here? That students aren’t allowed to ever be off-message and self-aggrandizing? That if they sometimes get confused about their sense of safety or the righteousness of their own actions, their entire plea becomes irrelevant?

Again, they’re students ! Have any of these people ever met one of those? They are completely within their rights to present muddled messaging to us. It’s not a crime.

We—the adults, the journalists, the police, the mayors, the university administrators—are the ones that are tasked with precision. We are the ones who are supposed to be mature enough to respond to the emotionality behind these protests, however diluted they may be by ill-timed requests for nut milk.

In the years I spent editing students, they wrote beautifully, wrenchingly, and bravely about the protests of those years—about the violence that broke out at Berkeley over right-wing provocateurs coming to campus; about the uproar at Middlebury when Charles Murray came to campus; about protests of Mike Pence at a conservative, Christian college; about the alt-right storming around their campuses; and about the horrible, deadly chaos of the Unite the Right riot at the University of Virginia.

In those years, students I edited also routinely railed against any simplification of their more jargon-infused rants, arguing, at times, that my attempts to streamline or simplify their words meant that I was a fascist. (It was 2016-2018, the early Trump years, and monitoring fascism was the cri de coeur.) They yelled at me for the slightest infractions, over pronouns (fair) or not understanding their specific campus’s dynamics (a sign that I might be a fascist). They publicly disavowed their op-eds all over social media and in the comments of their own essays while privately thanking me (because even when I wasn’t fascist, the New York Times certainly was). One enterprising University of Oregon grad even FOIAed my communications with that school’s president after the president wrote a fairly tame op-ed about the ironies of students silencing others by yelling about fascism. (That FOIA request led to a story in the Eugene Weekly that characterized my editing notes as indicative of my own pernicious opinions which, you guessed it, were fascist.)

SO WHAT?! I’m an adult! I can handle it! Did I like being called a fascist? No. Did I feel misunderstood? Yes. Is that worth airing publicly? Only to shame you pearl-clutching adult babies who are shocked— shocked! —that students aren’t always intellectually and emotionally consistent!

You’re getting the picture here, right? Students protest. And they protest in raw, emotional, and sometimes confused ways—especially during times of societal upheaval. In 2017, Donald Trump had just been elected and we were tsk-ing students because they opposed having their campuses turned into stage sets for right-wing content creators. In 2024, we’re hurtling toward another fraught and terrifying election, the Supreme Court is basically handing this thing to Trump, individual rights are being rolled back across many different demographic groups, there’s a brutal war being piped into everyone’s social media feeds, the White House is really not up to approaching the current moment with soothing fire-side chats … and we’re mad that the students are freaking out?

I am not excusing antisemitism or Islamophobia. The protests across college campuses have contained plenty of hateful sloganeering that is worth condemning. But I am calling for a little more emotional clarity from the adults who condemn these students for being imperfect ciphers of morality. None of us should be attacking each other for our identities or religious upbringing—but I’m willing to bet that more than a handful of the college kids swept up in the current anti-war fervor had no idea that “from the river to the sea” evoked a sinister double meaning to some American Jews.

And let’s be real: Students have rioted over much, much less. At my own alma mater, Kenyon College, there was a planned, annual riot held each spring until the 1990s, a concession granted to students to let them blow off some steam—and one that ensured the college could save most of its campus buildings in the process.

The riots started in 1964—and let me tell you, it was not because of the Vietnam war or some other contemporary societal turbulence. It was because new traffic signs had been installed in town and jaywalking laws were being enforced. The students tore down six stop signs and blocked highway patrol cars, causing such chaos they were written up in the Columbus Dispatch. Then the students commemorated those actions annually by upping the ante—throwing couches out of windows, burning trees and campus furniture, mauling the firetruck that came one year to respond to a cherry bomb that had been launched into the quad. When the fire truck arrived on the scene, students reportedly bashed in its headlights with hammers and urinated on the wheels. (The school was all-men in those days, if you couldn’t already tell.) In the late ’60s, the school decided to sanction the event as a safety measure, setting aside old furniture in some kind of appeasement scheme that didn’t always tame the chaos.

That is all to say: The students occupying school buildings, putting up tents in their quads and marching through their campuses are not a sign of some worrisome new trend that we have to crack down on. They are a cohort of young people who are witnessing horrific brutality at a time of unprecedented American politics and who want it to stop.

It is our job, as the adults, to let them protest, loudly and imperfectly. Because guess what? This is what it means to grow up in the United States.

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Frank Bruni

Chris christie and bill barr have some explaining to do.

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

I admired the vigor and even eloquence with which Chris Christie, quixotically campaigning for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, made the case against Donald Trump. And I wrote as much .

But what he warrants today isn’t praise. It’s a lesson in chemistry. It’s a tutorial on beverages.

A little more than a week ago, during a public appearance at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Christie told Leigh Ann Caldwell of The Washington Post that he would never back Trump in November but that he also couldn’t bring himself to vote for President Biden. To explain his Biden aversion, Christie used a vocabulary more appropriate for spoiled milk.

“President Biden, in my view, is past the sell-by date,” he said .

The sell-by date matters when you’re purchasing dairy and you have better, fresher alternatives. But when you’re choosing a president and the other candidate is arsenic?

That’s pretty much how Christie spent much of last year describing Trump — as a civic toxin, a poison to us all. And if drinking spoiled milk is the protection against arsenic, you drink the spoiled milk. One means a possible tummy ache. The other can lead to lesions, cancer, even death.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump was a catalyst for bizarre moral relativism and pitiable moral surrender, and it’s happening again.

Christie calculates a false equivalence between Biden, whose policies he opposes and whose years are showing, and Trump, whose character and conduct Christie professedly reviles.

Bill Barr, the former attorney general who saw up close how Trump tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power and who said in August that Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” now supports his return to it . Barr’s position, it seems, is that Trump’s lawlessness pales beside Biden’s liberalism and that authoritarianism is a small price to pay for keeping the woke social justice warriors at bay.

Then there’s Chris Sununu, the New Hampshire governor, who was all in for Nikki Haley until she was all out of hope. He’s now on Team Trump, as he confirmed last month during an inexpressibly depressing interview on the ABC News show “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, who was dumbfounded, given Sununu’s past characterizations of Trump.

“You support him for president, even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection,” Stephanopoulos said, trying to make sure he understood Sununu correctly. “You support him for president, even though you believe he’s lying about the last election.”

“Yeah,” Sununu answered. “Me and 51 percent of America.”

That “51 percent” part gets to me as much as the rest of it: Trump is tolerable because many Americans (if not the “51 percent” that Sununu essentially invented) say he is. Must give the people whatever they want. I’m reminded of what our parents said to us when we argued for permission for something because all our friends were being allowed to do it: If those friends are jumping off a bridge, should you? Sununu’s answer, it seems, is yes. He’s jumping, along with all the other Republicans in moral free fall.

The conservative Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis recently looked at a few of the most prominent of those Republicans , venting disgust over the rationalizations of not only Barr and Sununu but also Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, who once strongly denounced Trump’s part in the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Shocker of shockers: McConnell will vote for him in November.

“Keep in mind, following Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021, McConnell said that ‘Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty’ and that ‘there is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,’” Lewis wrote. “Supporting a man McConnell has clearly deemed unfit for the office may make McConnell craven, cynical or absurd, but he’s not alone in his decision.” Far from it.

Christie at least isn’t supporting Trump. That’s something. And it’s a reason that he can hold his head higher than Sununu, Barr or McConnell can. But we’re talking inches, not yards, because his joint dismissals of Trump and Biden as similarly unsavory options gut his own appraisal, during that appearance in Chicago, of Trump as someone “wholly unfit to be president of the United States in every way you think.”

I’m not saying that Christie should be enthusiastic about Biden, that I don’t understand his qualms about the president or that I expect Christie and other longtime Republicans to have some sudden ideological conversion because their party’s nominee is such a grave threat. I’m asking Christie to remember that less than six months ago, he called Trump “a dictator.” And seemed to believe that.

But last week in Chicago he lumped Trump and Biden together: “If the American people are stupid enough to nominate these two guys, doesn’t mean I have to be stupid, too.” No, but the smart way to bar someone “wholly unfit” from the White House is to vote for that person’s opponent. That’s how elections work. “None of the above” isn’t a principled stand. It’s a moral cop-out — and its own dereliction of duty.

For the Love of Sentences

Much like Gary Shteyngart’s article on the world’s biggest cruise ship a few weeks back, Ron Charles’s appraisal in The Washington Post of Danielle Steel’s new novel, “Only the Brave,” was a start-to-finish jamboree of shining sentences: “By my count, ‘Only the Brave’ is Steel’s 152nd novel, but her publicist tells me, ‘It is closer to her 170th.’ Apparently, the actual number can only be guessed at, in the same way the total mass of dark matter in the universe is estimated by how it bends light.” Also: “In the months leading up to this week’s publication, Steel’s publicist reached out repeatedly to insist that I not mention that the author is a 76-year-old romance novelist. As always, we’re never ashamed of the right things.” (Thanks to Joan Pantsios of Chicago and William Harrison of Kelowna, British Columbia, among others, for drawing attention to Charles’s review.)

Speaking of book reviews — my Times colleague Dwight Garner weighed in memorably on both a memoir and a collection of essays by Joseph Epstein: “Epstein favors tasseled loafers and bow ties, and most of his sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie.” (Kevin Callahan, Forest Hills, N.Y., and Elinor Nauen, Manhattan)

Sticking with The Times, which was the source of most of your nominations over the past week — Margaret Lyons perfectly described the main character of the messy but mesmerizing “Baby Reindeer,” a new Netflix series about an aspiring stand-up comedian and his stalker: “Donny recognizes and articulates the dangers of wanting fame, how it warps his judgment but also could solve his problems. (One person knowing your darkest secret is unbearable, but a million people knowing it is stardom.) Agony and attention are bound together here — Look at me! No, not like that! — twin snakes choking the life out of their prey.” (Linda Trocki, La Quinta, Calif., and Stephen Ranger, Toronto)

And Maggie Haberman and Jonah E. Bromwich used a wide-angle lens to look at Trump’s current criminal trial. “Eventually, the case could threaten not only Mr. Trump’s freedom but also the central tenets of a lifelong ethos ever-present in the former president’s patter: a convenient disregard for the truth, the blunt denial of anything damaging and a stubborn insistence that his adversaries are always acting in bad faith,” they wrote. (Cynthia Croasdaile, Portland, Ore., and Veronica Stinson, Halifax, Nova Scotia, among others)

In The Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams rued the “impersonal, tech-saturated” sameness of a new generation of cars: “Could a child ever dream about a Lucid or Rivian? These are generically good-looking, low-emissions vehicles that only a cyborg could lust over. They are songs sung through Auto-Tune, with clever and forgettable lyrics composed by ChatGPT.” (Marjorie Ivey, St. Louis)

In The Guardian, Ryan Busse pivoted from Kristi Noem to another Republican governor with animals in his sights, Greg Gianforte of Montana: “In 2021, Gianforte illegally shot and killed a collared Yellowstone wolf that had its leg caught in a steel-jawed trap. He wanted to stuff the wolf and display it in his office — presumably without its radio collar, which would have dampened the effect he was going for.” (Kurt Griffin, Sioux Falls, S.D.)

To return to The Washington Post — Michael Dirda’s review of Anne Curzan’s “Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words” included this rumination on writing: “Effective prose, in truth, doesn’t resemble conversation. It’s more like sculpting with clay. You start with an inchoate mass, shape it a bit, hate the result, start over, try this, try that, give up, slink away in disgust, come back, work some more and eventually end up with something that looks vaguely like a pot or an essay.” (James Martin Thompson, Washington)

Having begun with Ron Charles, I’ll also end with him. In a recent Washington Post newsletter, he marveled at the actress Judi Dench’s astonishing ability to recite most of the lines from her long-ago parts in Shakespeare plays. “Such memorization is a lost art,” he wrote, adding that when he stares at the ceiling at night, “My mind is a tangle of bits of string, and all I can come up with is something like: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff?’” For those of you not fluent in Fleetwood Mac, that last sentence is a lyric from the song “ Second Hand News .” (Denise Showers, Janesville, Wis.)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.

What I’m Doing, Planning and Reading

I spoke about my new book, “The Age of Grievance,” which came out this week, on “The Bulwark Podcast” with Tim Miller, and The Free Press just published the latest excerpt from it , about some of the particular ways in which the modern American economy sows envy and resentment. As someone whose diminished eyesight has made him a big and grateful consumer of audiobooks, I found it meaningful to do “The Age of Grievance” narration myself; here are its first five minutes . In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be making appearances in Montclair, N.J. ; Philadelphia ; and Washington, among other cities: My full schedule is on my website, where you’ll also find a range of information about the book. Also, I just added another event near my Chapel Hill, N.C., home, at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village, on May 23; more details on that here .

Two Times colleagues whom I like and respect immensely have books of their own coming out in the next few weeks. “ Chasing Hope” is Nick Kristof’s look back at his extraordinary journalism career, including his travels to places most of us have never been and will never see. “ Trippy: The Perils and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics ” is Ernesto Londoño’s mix of candid personal reflection and deep reporting, illuminating a growing trend in mental health that many of us don’t understand.

Campus protests have riveted and divided Americans and led to bitterly tense scenes such as the arrests on Tuesday night of protesters who had barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall at Columbia University. How to make sense of it all? Two of the best recent takes came from George Packer in The Atlantic and Lydia Polgreen in The Times . I don’t agree with every paragraph or sentence that each of them wrote, but that’s not what I’m looking for in a piece of journalism, especially one covering such an important topic. I’m looking to be made smarter and to understand the dynamics of a situation more fully, and I’m looking for analysis that seeks to lower rather than raise the temperature. Both articles fill that bill.

On a Personal Note

I was happy to include a few lines about the Netflix series “Baby Reindeer” in this week’s For the Love of Sentences section not only because the lines in question are terrific but also because they reminded me to say a few words of my own about the show.

It’s definitely not for everyone. It’s harrowingly dark, and it’s also repetitive, revisiting or lingering on developments and details that have been amply examined. Streaming services these days seem to take the approach that any story that can be told in X number of hours or installments should be given 25 to 50 percent more time than that. Bloat is a given.

But little that I’ve watched lately gripped and haunted me the way “Baby Reindeer” did. It’s the story, based on real events, of a struggling (really, failing) comedian and his stalker, and it is so raw and so true on the subject of human neediness that it’s a gut punch. Who among us hasn’t felt some version of the desperation that these characters do? Hasn’t made awful choices just for the sake of having company, of being seen, of being admired, no matter the flaws, delusions and demands of the admirer?

“Baby Reindeer” isn’t a simple perpetrator-and-victim tale. It examines how we see and don’t see what’s right in front of us, depending on what we’re intent on believing. That’s true in politics, as the past few years have vividly demonstrated. But it’s even truer when we’re looking for love. Or hope. Or just the barest smidgen of affirmation.

Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book "The Age of Grievance" and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter . Instagram Threads @ FrankBruni • Facebook

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Rhetoric in On Morality by Joan Didion
From Joan Didion's essay 'On Morality.' All this holds up, even more so
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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her
The essay appears in 1967's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a representative text of the literary nonfiction of the sixties alongside the work of John McPhee, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.In Didion's case, the emphasis must be decidedly on the literary—her essays are as skillfully and imaginatively ...
On Morality
Didion opens her essay, " On Morality ," by immediately letting the reader know that she is writing from her own perspective. "As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119°. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small ...
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December 23, 2021. Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion's seminal essay "Self ...
Joan Didion on Learning Not to Mistake Self-Righteousness for Morality
In consequence, any true morality is the diametric opposite of self-righteousness — the very thing that so often masquerades for morality. That paradox is what Joan Didion (December 5, 1934-December 23, 2021), a writer who has spent a lifetime mirroring us back to ourselves, examines with characteristic incisiveness in a short 1965 essay ...
Joan Didion on Self-Respect
Joan Didion (December 5, 1934-December 23, 2021) spent a lifetime dissecting the complexities of cultural chaos with equal parts elegant anxiety, keen criticism, and moral imagination.. From her 1968 essay anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem (public library) comes "On Self Respect" — a magnificent meditation on what it means to live well in one's soul, touching on previously ...
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Joan Didion's writings emphasize the importance of self-examination in establishing a sense of morality. In most of her works, Didion pushes her readers to reflect on their own values, belief system, and their actions. Didion's perspective on morality suggests that self-examination is crucial to understanding your moral compass.
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In 1961, shortly after having been hired by Vogue, Joan Didion—then in her late twenties—composed one of the essays she would become best-known for, a short, yet surprisingly capacious meditation on self-respect."Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception," she mused in the piece, which was simply titled "On Self-Respect," and would ...
Play It as It Lays Critical Essays
Analysis. Didion is a moralist, but her vision of morality is never sentimental, only clearly and rigidly stark. Play It as It Lays is an existential novel (and essentially a moral tale) about ...
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Morality Lyrics. As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119°. I cannot seem to make the air ...
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. [1] The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006).
The Magic and Moral of Joan Didion
Griffin asks if he was put off decades earlier by her frank essay about trouble in their marriage. ... Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Magic And Moral of Joan Didion. Order ...
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Joan Didion was a Californian-born journalist and author who passed away this week. Her writing centered around the fringes of culture and was incisively honest. In this excerpt from a 1961 essay titled On Self-Respect, Didion argued for a morally robust state of being and looked back a generation to a value that was once called 'character'.
Joan Didion: Why I Write ‹ Literary Hub
One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: I. I. I. In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
Joan Didion's Best Books: A Guide
The Joan Didion many people know is constructed from a few artifacts the real writer left behind when she died in 2021.There's her much-imitated (and sometimes parodied) 1967 essay "Goodbye to ...
Slouching Towards Bethlehem Part 2, Essays 12-13 Summary & Analysis
Part 2, Essay 12 Summary: "On Morality". Didion is in a Death Valley motel on a 119° day trying to write a piece on morality for The American Scholar. She distrusts morality as an overarching concept and is more interested in its particulars, which she explains via an accident on the previous night. A car turned over on the highway, and ...
Coming to terms with Joan Didion's "On Morality"
This resource introduces, suggests, and proposes multiple approaches for making Joan Didion's essay more accessible while trying not to oversimplify it. Subject: English Language Arts Level: High School Material Type: Activity/Lab, Assessment, Homework/Assignment, Lecture Notes, Reading Author: Bryan Harvey Date Added: 12/28/2019
Morality In Joan Didion's Essay
444 Words2 Pages. Joan Didion uses rhetorical words in her essay "Morality," to explain her reasons why she viewed morality as social, and established expectation. Didion starts her essay, by presenting emotional appeals to her particular setting. "As it happens, I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park ...
(DOC) Critique: On Morality by Joan Didion
Joan Didion's highly distinct non-fiction writing style has cemented her reputation as one of America's finest living prose stylists. This essay analyzes her use, or lack of use, of transition devices throughout her essay "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" in order to depict events, places, and persons of the 1960s with a social as well as a philosophical concern.
Joan Didion 'On Morality' Essay
In Joan Didion's essay "On Morality," Didion digs deep into how to know what is the true meaning of morality, why it is important, and how society has their morals mixed up. It's important to understand because it's a discussion that occurs in big events that happened in the United States. Dating back to the 1960s during the Civil ...
Essay On Morality
In Joan Didion's essay, "On Morality," she uses examples to show how morality is used to justify actions and decisions by people. She explains that morality can have a profound effect on the decisions that people chose to make. I think that morality is an idea that is different for every individual based on
Morality, By Joan Didion
Morality, By Joan Didion. Morality in its basic definition, is the knowledge between what is right and what is wrong. In Joan Didion's essay, "On Morality," she uses examples to show how morality is used to justify actions and decisions by people. She explains that morality can have a profound effect on the decisions that people chose to ...
Joan Didion On Morality Essay
Joan Didion On Morality Essay. Joan Didion is an author who was part of the New Journalism movement during the 1960s and '70s which was quite a change from the traditional styles. New Journalism utilized research and fiction-like writing methods to explore topics on events that occurred in the sixties and seventies.
‎There Will Be Books: Episode 159 "Ripley, Hitchens, and Didion" on
This week we're reviewing the latest Ripley adaptation, and discussing two essays from prominent 20th century writers. We begin by discussing a short bookish essay by Christopher Hitchens and then review Joan Didion's essay on John Wayne. And lastly, we heap all kinds of praise on the Ripley series debuting on Netflix. Fun episode for everybody ...
His Book Was Repeatedly Banned. Fighting For It Shaped His Life
Joan Didion's distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider's frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .
College campus protests: The students are acting like students. It's
Joan Didion does some delightfully bitchy skewering of student protesters in The White Album, writing about the kids at San Francisco State College in 1968 who—during the fiery protests against ...
Adam Rubin Reviews 3 Toothless Crime Stories for Kids
Joan Didion's distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider's frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .
Chris Christie and Bill Barr Have Some Explaining to Do
In 2016 and 2020, Trump was a catalyst for bizarre moral relativism and pitiable moral surrender, and it's happening again. Christie calculates a false equivalence between Biden, whose policies ...

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On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue

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