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.
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.
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?
Her early writings got Buckley’s attention. Don’t know if she ever had anything published in NR.
Didion was published in National Review early on. Buckley liked people who could write and when it came to the back of the magazine book reviews and such, he wasn't too picky about their politics. WFB gave ultra-lefty John Leonard a job early on, and he discovered David Brooks.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/joan-didion-the-national-review-years/
The Reagans rubbed her the wrong way, but I suspect it wasn't that they were that different from what she was, but that people around her despised them and eventually she came to share the feeling. She came to be really cynical about America and about California. That's understandable in literary circles, but it was a pity. What she came to believe wasn't any less mythic than what she came to reject.
Her husband died in December, around the holidays, and her daughter was sick then, too. I guess she couldn't take another one. Her husband's family used to think of themselves as the Kennedys of Connecticut. That's asking for trouble. Her brother-in-law Dominick Dunne also had his share of tragedies and secrets too.