Posted on 12/23/2021 11:48:00 AM PST by nickcarraway
Joan Didion has died at the age of 87, her publisher has confirmed.
The legendary essayist, novelist and screenwriter — who had long been revered as one of America’s pre-eminent writers — passed away at her Manhattan home Thursday morning.
“We are deeply saddened to report that Joan Didion died earlier this morning at her home in New York due to complications from Parkinson’s disease,” Penguin Random House/Knopf said in a statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
She was always such a kvetch.
I hope she has found peace at last.
She was almost invariably pictured with a cigarette in her hand. No idea if it was mainly a prop or she really was a 5-pack/day smoker, but if the latter, it’s kind of amazing that she made 87. R.I.P.
I’ve heard of ‘Slouching toward Bethlehem’ but never had a chance to read it. RIP.
In her book SALVADOR, she said she stayed at the (four star Weston hotel) Camino Real because it was the only safe place to stay. Yet she poked fun at upper middle class Salvadoran women shopping across the street with “children and maids in tow.” Her little travel log was filled with errors about El Salvador but pushed the usual Leftist points and slandered the Rightists. She was such a waste of space.
You should; it's a collection of brilliant essays, and one of the best depictions of California in the 1960s.
RIP.
Sad that neither her husband nor her daughter survived her.
I’ve also never read anything of hers, and would be interested to know from folk who have what is worth exploring.
Her adopted daughter died before her too. I dont believe she had any children.of her own—good!!!!!
Her and her UC Berkeley types should never reproduce.
Legendary? LOL!
The Second Coming
By William Buster Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
After that she made a bunch of money with her husband writing Hollywood screenplays and became a typical leftist. She lost a daughter to a crazed killer boyfriend. Maybe that got to her somehow.
Maybe the best poem ever. Certainly very appropriate for our current time.
Her first two collections of essays ‘Slouching toward Bethlehem’ and ‘The White Album’ are very good. Conservative take on excesses of the 60’s. Her first novels ‘Play it as it Lays’ and ‘Run River’ (a nod to her life growing up in Sacramento) are also worth a read.
For being so famous, I’ve never heard of her.
What was it that Trump called countries like El Salvador?
Maybe because she never wrote any books about moose.
Her early writings got Buckley’s attention. Don’t know if she ever had anything published in NR.
A legend of whom I’ve never heard.
never read anything by her.
Ditto. Who?
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