I like Joan Didion's writing (she's sort of the anti-Annie Dillard to me. Dillard, like a good mystic, can get lost in her own internal experience and writing about it. Didion, even in writing about the death of her husband and her daughter, almost doesn't seem to have an "internal experience). The person? Eh, I never knew her.
Don't know Annie Dillard either, so we're square.
Was watching the documentary on Didion on Netflix, and honestly it was so much Didion it was almost exhausting. Still, admiration. Except when they got to the point where she wrote about El Salvador (I think I still have my hardback copy of "Salvador". Really great stuff.), and they quoted her on politics, how politics seemed like something done by other people in another realm, with no connection to "real life."
About that time, per the documentary, she was living in Malibu and working in movies, and was friends with Harrison Ford (from his carpentry days), and houseguests included Scorsese and Spielberg and other "glitterati" and notables. And when she and John Gregory Dunne weren't living in California, they were living in NYC. She started out writing for Vogue and never really got down to the ground level where Molly Ivins wrote from (and why Molly didn't get along with the NYT), or just herself alone in the countryside, where Annie Dillard trumped Thoreau (and thumped him) in every way possible (she really runs rings 'round him).
And, in an Annie Dillardism, I'm left wondering: whose life is "real life"?
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