Why haven't I read Joan Didion before?

[Cain]

You guys are slacking, because this is some seriously good stuff:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Wikipedia quote for those who wants to know more:

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known as a novelist and writer of personalized, journalistic essays. The disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos upon which her essays comment are explored more fully in her novels, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.

[LMNO]

On my list, as of right now.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

OH WOW! I heard an interview with her once I think on NPR... thats been a few years back, but she made some really fantastic comments.

*goes off to raid NPR archives*


PING: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4956088

[Iason Ouabache]

I swear that I had to read something by her for one of my high school English classes but I can't remember what it was for the life of me. Might have been something from "Slouching Towards Bethlehem". This is going to bug the hell out of me until I figure it out.