Fimoculous.com (Free subscription) | 07/17/2008
Let's call it a modernization, but updated with more frustration than melancholy, to Joan Didion's 1967 essay about leaving NYC, "Goodbye To All That," which had been playing on repeat next to my bed, but 40 years later is revealed to have a better b-side: Au Revoir, New York 'Literary' Scene!
No Good for Me (Free subscription) | 07/16/2008
I'm going through this huge Joan Didion phase at the moment. I shouted out Play It As It Lays before, but I'm also reading lots and lots of her essays and interviews and nonfiction collections, including the totes brilliant Slouching...
buffy holt (Free subscription) | 06/12/2008
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” - Joan Didion ———— If you had to have one job, for the rest of your life, and you had to do it for free…what would it be? It’s a [...]
John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot (Free subscription) | 05/24/2008
"Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power." - Joan Didion
Interval Drinks (Free subscription) | 05/13/2008
I have always liked Joan Didion's writing. In the 1960s and 70s, whilst her (mainly male) contemporaries threw themselves into the worlds they were writing about with abandon, Didion retained a coolness of voice and head. She was always a little removed from what she was describing, insulated from the excess, collected and considered. Part of things and yet not. The Year Of Magical Thinking , currently...
Sterne (Free subscription) | 05/12/2008
Clockwise from top left: Lanark , Alasdair Gray; Pump Six and Other Stories , Paolo Bagigalupi; The Essential Ellison , Ellison, et al; Strange Things In Close Up , Howard Waldrop; Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Sentimental Journeys , Joan Didion. Pump Six arrived in today's mail courtesy of its publisher, Night Shade Books. I want to get back into reviewing new/newish fiction and I'm looking forward...
tart juice (Free subscription) | 05/11/2008
Tonight I drank a lot of coffee at Starbucks and then wandered into a CVS pharmacy to buy nail polish and sunscreen. It occurred to me that I needed facial products, and the bright yet somehow soothing glow of the backlit shelves combined with the caffeine to numb my brain as I half-consciously weighed the comparative benefits of Aveeno and Olay exfoliants. Emerging thirty minutes later through the...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 05/09/2008
Sitting in the Lyttelton Theatre the other day, watching the first night of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I was momentarily distracted from what was happening in front of me by something going on behind me, namely an audible mutter of rebuke from one theatre-goer at the noisy bronchial honking of another. I don't know whether Vanessa Redgrave noticed, up on stage, but quite a lot of...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 05/07/2008
Leader: This is writing as taxonomy: an attempt to pin down a living, still-squirming thing and analyse how it works in spare, air-conditioned prose
pretty* in the city (Free subscription) | 05/06/2008
S o I know I'm a few years late on this, but I'm reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and it's hands-down one of the best books I have ever read. Like, I want to buy a copy for everyone I know and make them read it. I've always known of Joan Didion and was aware of people's fascination with her; now I know why. Like, I want to put her picture on my mantle and pray to it nightly. The...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 05/04/2008
Theatre/The main event: Vanessa Redgrave brings radiance to Joan Didion's account of her disarray after the deaths of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter
The Independent (Free subscription) | 05/04/2008
Speaking ill of the dead is taboo. Criticising someone who's talking about bereavement surely is as well, which makes reviewing The Year of Magical Thinking uncomfortable. This is a monologue by the American writer Joan Didion, performed by Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare (as it was on Broadway in 2007). It is based on Didion's memoir of the same title which, stateside, has become a popular...
Whatsonstage.com (Free subscription) | 05/01/2008
Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking received its UK premiere last night (30 April, previews from 25 April 2008) at the National Theatre, where it runs in rep in the NT Lyttelton until 15 July ahead of a national and international tour. The A...
Whatsonstage.com (Free subscription) | 05/01/2008
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it changes. So says Joan Didion, played with a rapt and enraptured beauty by Vanessa Redgrave, in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion's elegant memoir described by her director, David Hare, as an indis...
The Stage - Newsblog (Free subscription) | 05/01/2008
David Hare makes a particularly revealing comment in his programme note for the adaptation of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking that he first directed on Broadway last year and has now brought to the National Theatre (where it opened last night) about what he thought when he was first approached to do the job: “It was easy enough to spend a few hours reading a book about death which you could...
