Got a girl crush on: Joan Didion

[Guest Post by Erin!]

Joan Didion did some superficially cool things like hang out with the Doors and drink in the afternoons, but that’s not why she’s crush-worthy. Didion’s nonfiction, particularly personal essays from her 20s like those in White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, came to symbolize what only an observer, not a participant, could glean from Southern California in the 60s. Her writing was unemotional and impassionate (she was, first and foremost, a journalist), yet it conveyed a subtly cunning point of view that a reader automatically agrees with, understands and applies to herself. Didion has the inimitable ability to make you reframe everything you thought you understood about yourself. One of her most well-known passages:

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”