So You Want to Be Joan Didion . . .

To a certain set of young women Joan Didion is something of an intellectual godmother. These women (they are almost always women) are attracted to her knife-like prose and her cool “disassembling of overprecious myth,” as the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino put it at Didion’s memorial service in 2022. They want to sound like her, look like her, be her.