![]() ![]() To recount her origins feels like revisiting a fairy tale: that first story written at 5 her learning to type by obsessively copying Hemingway’s sentences her habit of storing drafts in the freezer the way she returned to her childhood home to finish her first four books, in a bedroom painted carnation pink with green vines growing over the windows, filtering the light.Īs a junior editor at Vogue magazine, Didion wrote short essays and captions for photographs. ![]() She was a writer preoccupied with, and troubled by, mythos - of youth, of America’s founding, of social movements, of the ’60s - and preternaturally gifted at fashioning her own. She essentially created the modern grief memoir with her book “The Year of Magical Thinking,” in which she memorialized her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died of a sudden heart attack in 2003. The rapt self-fascination she demonstrated in essays about her possessions, her rituals - she could make migraines sound aspirational - are the lingua franca of a certain kind of personal writing on the internet. Her heroines - those chic, obliquely wounded sylphs - seem ubiquitous in contemporary fiction. ![]() What concerns me is total control.” Her great subjects - the temptation and corruption of self-delusion, the fabrication of political narratives - are now staples of journalism. “I’m not much interested in spontaneity,” she once said. She fashioned a style that was dominant, inescapable, catchy. ![]()
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