“The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

Didion 2The power of this final sharp sentence in the essay “The Santa Ana” by Joan Didion comes, in part, from the preceding sentence’s beautiful set-up: “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way … Read More

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Didion croppedThis is the first sentence from The White Album by Joan Didion, a classic from 1979.  Known for her precise, unsentimental tone, she “wrote with a cool head in accordance with the principle that the lower the temperature of her prose, the higher the emotional voltage it could carry.”  … Read More