From the New York Times's obituary of Joan Didion, the writer who died last week:
Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from "The White Album," she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.
It read, in part: "In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure." This description, which Ms. Didion did not contest, could describe the archetypal heroine of her novels.
[Snip]
The intricacies of Cuban-American politics were the subject of "Miami" (1987), another extended foray into personal journalism, which some critics began to find wearying. Everywhere Ms. Didion went, it seemed, she found the identical set of circumstances: looming chaos, an atmosphere saturated with dread and absurdities described by unwitting participants in cliched language indicated by quotation marks.
In an Introduction to a collection of Didion's nonfiction, John Leonard, who did not grow weary, nevertheless limns the same sensibility. He alludes to the critic (Randall Jarrell) who thought T. S. Eliot would have produced "The Wasteland" if assigned the task of composing a poem about the Garden of Eden. Similarly, indicates Leonard, with Didion. Elizabeth Hardwick's essay about Didion is called "In the Wasteland." No one "likes" the world according to Joan Didion, and few would agree that she's even describing the world they think they know, but she makes her case. The title of the aforementioned collection is We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live. The phrase occurs in one of her essays and, out of context on the cover, has an air of vague uplift such as might have been approved by someone in marketing. But if you read through even a fraction of its 1100 pages you'd see that an apt gloss is more along the line of "we lie to ourselves in order to feel good."
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