Laughing Like a Seagull

January 13, 2012

Fantastic, deeply insightful piece charting what is behind our collective Didion obsession. Certainly nailed part of what’s behind mine.

“The New York Times Book Review hailed Slouching Towards Bethlehem as “a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country,” and the book was everywhere well received, but it was no rocket ship in the beginning, finding its audience in gradually enlarging waves, woman by woman, and slowly building to a phenomenon not often seen in the book business: becoming something far too widely read to be called a cult book, but engendering a cult’s kind of fierce and jealously protective loyalty. Encountering someone who loves it as much as you do is a bedeviling experience: you have met both a landsman and a rival; each of us believes that our relationship with the book is unique.”

natashavc:

“Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures. Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.”

The Autum of Joan Didion — By Caitlin Flanagan

IT IS INCREDIBLE