Joan Didion, Thomas Powers observed after she died aged 87 in 2021, is “almost brutally direct, but it’s never entirely clear what she means to say” – including to her, one might add. Bluntness and a certain opacity, exactitude and elusiveness, even avoidance: this paradoxical blend, as Didion’s iconic status attests, proved to be culturally intoxicating. She set the forthright, cagey tone as early as her first, reputation-making essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). In her reluctant preface, she complains that after the title essay was published, “I saw that, however directly and flatly I thought I had said it, I had failed to get through.”
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