Articles and Essays
A beautiful meditation on keeping notes that explores the heart of the writing process.
"Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others
might find excessive."
In the aftermath of her husband's death, Didion meditates on the fickle fragility of life.
"When I first saw New York some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and
all the songs I had ever heard about
New York, informed me that things would never be quite the same again."
Growing up - J-diddy style.
"Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and
beautiful in its venality and in its devotion
to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls
and ladies’ room attendants with amyl
nitrite in their uniform pockets."
Exploring the art of writing, and what it means to the author.
An eclectic collection of short memoir and disjointed prose snapshots from the years 1968
-1978.
" There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural
stillness, some tension. What it means is that
tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow..."
“You can’t just leave a body on the highway,” she said. “It’s immoral.”
"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..."
The dark side of the American Dream.
"I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although
the men I have known have had many
virtues, they have never been John Wayne."
