Essays

Writing the Self: On Joan Didion

Rebecca Harkins-Cross

Unlike many of her New Journalism contemporaries, Didion is willing to remain an observer in her essays. Her greatest strength, she has maintained, is that she is ‘so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that [her] presence runs counter to their best interests’. What she offers is an ability to examine the patterns of her own thinking ruthlessly, the intellectual trajectories through which she develops her conception of the world.

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