Joan Didion | Joan Didion
Nov.08.2011
Last night Joan Didion read in Cambridge, Mass., and I was lucky enough to have seen her do so. I went with a friend (a lovely and talented woman and writer in her own right) without any tickets hoping that there might be a smidge enough room for us to squeeze in, which, despite there being a...
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Nov.11.2010
Stories can be as important as brain surgery. To write them well can make an author a brain surgeon. I don’t say this lightly. When I see lines curl out the door of a bookstore for a reading by an author, or lines most recently outside theatres on Hollywood Boulevard for AFI Fest, it’s clear people...
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Oct.30.2010
Yesterday's face was that of Joan Didion. Didion's innovative style of memoir writing has surely influenced the writing of every would-be memoirist since the 'sixties brought her to the literary foreground. Her confessional postures, connected via a journalistic style to a sense of place and...
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Apr.21.2010
Many years ago, back when migraines and I were barely acquaintances, I read the 1979 essay In Bed by Joan Didion. This essay scared me to death due to the numbers in the first line: "Three, four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the day in bed with a migraine headache, insensible to the...
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Jan.29.2010
I've been thinking about magic. Even though I'm reading Joan Didion's memoir about the year she spent pondering how she might reverse her husband's death, I don't mean that kind of magical thinking.
I'm talking about context. In its absence, everything looks like magic.
David Blaine's recent TEDmed...
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Dec.07.2009
Books for the holidays: almost everyone on my list gets at least one! Here are my very opinionated picks, divided into my very opinionated categories. These are not all new books, but books have a long, long life: yes?
Reading about Grief:
The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham: The best book I read...
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Jan.17.2009
The things I did today:
I made Tiramisu with Hennessy Cognac
I made brown scones
I made Chicken casserole
I looked out the window and watched a leaf blow in through the window and fall in the porch
I read an english essay written by my thirteen year old son and cried
I played Blue Bossa on my...
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Jul.29.2008
How have I never read this before? I get the sense that this is one of those pieces that everyone else has stumbled across at some point, and recognized themselves in it, and then shared it with their loved ones, knowing they too would like to look in that mirror, and somehow I was bypassed. So,...
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