Didion is (and was) a force. Her book The Year of Magical Thinking has to be one of the best memoirs of the last 100 years; it perfectly takes you through the intersection between self indulgence, grief and healing in a single, very tough year for the author.
You can feel her insecurities in it, and you can see some of the same ones in this essay 40+ years earlier, the "Will I/won't I/Can I Be?" and the shot at writing about it from an "I've made it now, I can think sagely about it" angle, but at a very young age.
In the end, she's a hugely important American author who simply cannot resist namedropping repeatedly in the memoir of her grief over her husband's death; like most of us, she carries some of her gremlins through much of her adult life.
I think this essay is so fitting an essay for this site; it sort of reminds me in a way of Sam Altman's sage advice at 30 -- much of it brilliant -- but still written by someone with a lot of life left to live.
Ms. Didion had a lot of the same drive, insecurity and needs that drive the founders in our industry; she turned out some remarkable work; I hope that we as a group will too.
This is fantastic and unfortunate that it didn't stay on the front page longer. First time in a long time that's I've felt the urge to go read some old novels. Literature if you want to make it sound that way.
You can feel her insecurities in it, and you can see some of the same ones in this essay 40+ years earlier, the "Will I/won't I/Can I Be?" and the shot at writing about it from an "I've made it now, I can think sagely about it" angle, but at a very young age.
In the end, she's a hugely important American author who simply cannot resist namedropping repeatedly in the memoir of her grief over her husband's death; like most of us, she carries some of her gremlins through much of her adult life.
I think this essay is so fitting an essay for this site; it sort of reminds me in a way of Sam Altman's sage advice at 30 -- much of it brilliant -- but still written by someone with a lot of life left to live.
Ms. Didion had a lot of the same drive, insecurity and needs that drive the founders in our industry; she turned out some remarkable work; I hope that we as a group will too.