Joan Didion

Yes, Joan Didion!

My mind was fried totally last week when I read her book of essays from 1979, The White Album.

Like you, I have always sort of been annoyed at her media-enforced seeming sainthood, and just assumed all those Annie Leibowitz-y triptychs were just reflexively imposed by the Boz Scaggs fans who run magazines and for whom all the best things happened way back when, after they took an est seminar or what have you. And I read Play It As It Lays in high school or when I was 19 or so, and was sort of lukewarm toward it. But see, she's an essayist. I mean, for real. I could crib from other sources and talk of her "cold surgeon's eye" or something, but man, the precision! Weird topics like Bishop James Pike's death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Pike), are pinned down like butterflies, with the all the clammy 70's-ness intact.

This book seriously changed my opinion of Joan Didion entirely. "Contempt prior to investigation," and all. Plus she's friends with one Bret Easton Ellis and is Dominick Dunne's brother-in-law, so maybe we can all meet up on the olive farm one day and spout draughts of bitter mirth at one another.