Writing

Truth is provisional, and the only thing backing it up is who you are at the time you wrote this or that, and that your joys and biases and prejudices are part of writing too.

Didion the novelist taught Didion the nonfiction writer.

Part of Didion’s brilliance is not so much to define menace or the uncanny as to show it.

What Didion sought was a naturalness of expression as controlled by a true understanding of ones craft, the better to describe the ineffable, the uncanny in the every day.

“It is the genius of these papers that they talk directly to the reader. They assume that the reader is a friend, that he is disturbed about something, and that he will understand if you will talk to him straight.”