Words Seem Out Of Place

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” — Joan Didion, "Goodbye To all That The new Joan Didion Netflix documentary, The Center Will Not Hold , directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, is at the center of a well-deserved return to the spotlight for one of our greatest American writers. Countless insightful op-eds and articles have been written about her since the documentary dropped a few weeks ago, and I've read every one I could find. Joan Didion is having a moment, and any time a writer of her import is discussed, our society is better for it. If only we spent more time discussing the written word and how much it gets at the heart of our grand, flawed condition. Can you imagine what that world would look like? Didion's work, her writing, ...

Joan Didion turns 82 today. As an essayist, novelist, and cultural critic, Didion has long been one of the finest chroniclers of American life over the course of the last half of the twentieth century and beyond. There is much I could write about Didion, a writer whose work has affected me deeply over the years. I'll save that for another day, when I have more time to write. For now I'll just share this from her seminal essay, "Goodbye to All That:" I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year. Of course I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East. And then one morning in April (we had been married in January) he called an...