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grief feels like suspense,”
Joan Didion • The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage International)
All this made me think of Joan Didion’s most famous sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s a sentence that has found its way onto Pinterest boards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs, as though it were a consoling affirmation of The Power of Storytelling. It is not.
The sentence is the first one of Didion’s essay “The White Album,” whi... See more
The sentence is the first one of Didion’s essay “The White Album,” whi... See more
Alan Jacobs • Stories to Live By
Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage... See more
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
This entire notion of “the perfect mom/wife/homemaker,” of the “nostalgic siren call for a return to Fifties-style homemaking,” is a considerable misunderstanding of what Martha Stewart actually transmits, the promise she makes her readers and viewers, which is that know-how in the house will translate to can-do outside it.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
I invented reasons why it was essential for me to stay instead at the Beverly Wilshire.