Writing about Joan Didion can seem superfluous; after all, it is Joan Didion who has written most widely about Joan Didion. Perhaps more than with any other author, Didion’s personality is impossible to separate from the pages of her work. In five novels, three memoirs and an expansive collection of essays, Didion’s character drips from each precisely positioned word. This is not only a matter of style—her remarkable sense of rhythm, her incantatory repetitions of phrase, her famed lack of sentimentality—but it is the way readers can sense her world view forming and reforming each time she commits her thoughts to paper, the way her understanding of herself is inextricable from her understanding of her subjects. Her oeuvre has, over time, become a map of her subjectivity, the location of each idea or event subtly repositioned in every piece of prose.

Didion’s writing of the self is far removed from the brand of memoir we are familiar with today. Didion was born long before social media and reality TV began encouraging the masses to narrativise their lives, and her sensibility is at odds with the salacious tell-all or the voyeuristic confessional. Hers is more a brand of emotional honesty: sometimes brutal and always piercing enough to scar. 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. This technique teeters on solipsism, yet Didion has always retained an uncanny ability to locate herself and her subjects in a narrative of society more broadly.