Word: didions
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...Joan Didion, known largely for her fiction but also for her logical, meticulous and truthful essay writing, wants us to know exactly how little control we have over the process. In her elegant and incisive depiction of the usurpation of the political system, Political Fictions, Didion contends that politics has become little more than a fine-tuned performance, a rehearsed moment designed with the ultimate goal of increasing the power of the inner circle and pushing the “outsiders” further away...
Political Fictions emerged from a collection of essays initially published when the New York Review of Books sent Didion to cover the 1988 presidential campaign. Starting there and moving on to the presidencies of George Bush, Sr. and Ronald Reagan, the massacres in El Mozote, El Salvador, the 1992 elections, the role of political journalists and George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” the book is a veritable indictment of a system that Didion sees as a narrative, a kind of “fiction”—and because...
Raised as a “conservative California Republican,” Didion describes in the forward how she voted in 1964 for Barry Goldwater, who represented the “keep out of our lives” view of limited government. Eventually, she grew disillusioned with the Republicans, becoming the first registered Democrat in her family. This had less to do with substantive disagreements than with her growing sense of alienation with the Republican party, and Didion began to question the existence of deep differences between America’s two parties...
...Hong Kingston discusses how growing up in a Chinese home in racially integrated Stockton helped her learn about different sensibilities. Jazzman Dave Brubeck, who grew up on a ranch in Ione, recalls how he heard polyrhythms in the sound of a galloping horse. As writer and native daughter Joan Didion notes, "California influenced everything about...
When it was announced, the book stirred a small literary tempest. In the New Yorker last November, Joan Didion argued at length that all writers, even those "less inclined than Hemingway to construe words as the manifest expression of personal honor," should have the only, and final, say on what among their work will appear in print. Oddly enough, after running Didion's vehement objections to the project, the New Yorker published an excerpt from True at First Light...