Although most of us will return to normal, we will mourn for the injured and the fallen. But selfishly we will also mourn our former selves. We are no longer the people who went blithely to Boylston yesterday.
Whatever subjects we choose, as women writers we are cataloging historical and cultural events in ways that go far deeper than the two-dimensional stories told by photographs. We get into the heads of our audience in ways that movies still can't.
These days, I'm having a lot of trouble with irony. Sometimes I'm even afraid of the concept. Imagine that -- a literature professor afraid of irony. Isn't that ironic? Why am I afraid?
Happy birthday, Joan Didion! The writer who made a name for herself with her first novel, Run, River, and her first book of literary journalism, Slouc...
Is it really a good thing for journalism to expect reporters to be empty vessels simply reiterating information from others? This defeats the very purpose of media as fourth estate, as a watchdog of the powers that be.
The ever lovable Diane Keaton has kept herself quite busy in the past year, publishing her memoir Then Again last November, shooting her upcoming film The Big Wedding, and now partnering with Audible.com to read from Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
The debate on mothers "having it all" continues. This is just one more example of a controversy where, as the mother of a son with autism, I feel I must watch from the sidelines.
Lists are arbitrary. No formula can rank James Joyce over Vladimir Nabokov, or Edith Wharton over Jane Austen. The intellectual knows it's most important to try and read all those great novels.
This slender memoir -- not in richness but size -- is about food, love, loss, the Harvard-heavy social structure of Cambridge; about growing up alone in a crowded room; and about the lessons that pass from mother to daughter.
Caitlin Flanagan goes there -- the third rail of women talking about other women -- the kind of stuff we lower our voices to share -- she goes after Joan Didion's portrayal of herself as a mother. With all due respect.
Beyond the raw details of her daughter's death, beyond her grasp to understand its aftermath and its applied metaphor, Blue Nights deals with the physical "dismantling" of Didion herself.
The Southern California Independent Booksellers Association has released the bestselling books at local, independent bookstores for the sales week end...
I once slept with a man because he gave me a copy of Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Before you judge me, read the book. It's lyrical and seductive and changes the way you think about reality, about life.
The publishing industry has now fully readied itself for the holidays, with offerings that include yet more aggressively-promoted slices of first-person recollection.
Blue Nights is the story of Joan Didion's craving for communion between the "I" of her individual event of loss and grief, and the "we" of its universal experience.
In discoursing on her daughter's death -- and after having analyzed in print her reaction to a husband's demise -- Joan Didion is absolutely dealing with reality, but is she dealing with everyone's reality?
Joan Didion has been given a gift with words and a surfeit of tragedy to write about. The contiguous deaths of her husband, filmmaker John Dunne, and ...
Tragedy in Joan Didion’s life became a common theme of her writing. "The Year of Magical Thinking," her memoir about the death of her husband John D...
"This was a much harder book to write than The Year of Magical Thinking," says Joan Didion about Blue Nights (to be released by Alfred A. Knopf on Nov...
MANHATTAN -- Before they were stars, Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Liza Minnelli, Candace Bergen and many others seeking fame in New York lived at the B...