At her memorial service, someone described Joan Didion as a rune: mysterious, remote, and indecipherable. All great writers are mysteries, but Didion’s mysteries seemed particularly tantalizing because her writing seemed so simple, so clear. And she herself seemed so proximate, so accessible, through the tangible world of objects. Her own things were celebrated but familiar—the big sunglasses, the cashmere sweaters, the Corvette Stingray. These were things that we all understood, even if we couldn’t all afford them.
