Joan Didion: A Literary Analysis

From start to finish, Wallace explains the autobiography lacks a voice as the story is “ghosted by Christine Brennan,” providing an unauthentic and nonengaging experience for the readers (141). Wallace observes that the reading fails to pull in readers on several fronts, one being the lack of emotion the text presents, “The book is inanimate because it communicates no real feeling and therefore gives us no sense of a conscious person” (151).

Many authors use storytelling as a vehicle to convey the immortality of past selves and those who have passed to not only in their piece of literature but in their life as an author. In Tim O’Brien’s work of fiction The Things They Carried, through his final chapter “The Lives of the Dead,” O 'Brien conveys that writing is a matter of survival since, the powers of storytelling can ensure the immortality of all those who were significant in his life. Through their immortality, O’Brien has the ability to save himself with a simple story. Through snippets of main plot event of other chapters, O’Brien speaks to the fact the dead have not actually left; they are gone physically, but not spiritually or emotionally. They live on in memories as Linda lives on in the memories of O’Brien and as many of his war buddies live on through his stories. He can revive them and bring them back to the world through his writings and through these emotions or events he experienced with them and with their deaths can make them immortal. Through the reminiscent stories of Linda and O’Brien’s war companions and himself, O’Brien conveys that storytelling allows people to reanimate others who have died and past selves to create an immortality of humans.

Stories bring people together because of the common theme of life, showing true human nature and feeling of love, pain, lust, ambition, and forgiveness. It is because of stories that we can feel comfortable in our own skin. Last week, Viola Davis delivered an emotional Oscar speech in which she stressed the importance of stories for representing existence. Similarly, the short story The Portable Phonograph, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the novel Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury expressed the importance of protecting literature and the power of knowledge. Although Davis’s speech was mainly about her own personal journey that has let her enjoy literature.

The first thing I do when I finally get home, after sliding face up, with my bike and soccer bag forming a haphazard 45 pound pile resting on my chest, down the near vertical 50 foot gravel slope of a highway overpass in construction, is find out the extent to which the outer layers of my skin are still connected to my back. I do this in the garage, careful that only brother is with me because I know my parents will worry. As I pull up my shirt, revealing my raw back to the glaring white LEDs overhead, I hear a kind of gasp as my brother exclaims “that looks really bad!” He takes a picture so I can see for myself. To be fair, a majority of my back is indeed quite red. But the scrapes only cover the surface, the stinging has subsided, and I am safely home. So, with this in mind, I laugh and try to reassure my brother. “It’s really not that bad,” I tell him repeatedly. I say that often these days. These words, as regards both this

Kakutani started the article by introducing Joan Didion; Kakutani speaks about how abstract Didion’s work was that it was purely fascinating. Kakutani then tells the readers about the incident that happened December 24, 2003 almost two years ago when Kakutani wrote this article. By Kakutani starting the article in such a fashion, makes the readers become more attached to Didion and feel the pain she felt when her daughter became ill and the lost of her husband.

Joan Didion is wearing oversize black sunglasses in a crowded, dark movie theater where the film about her life is premiering. Standing beside her nephew Griffin Dunne, who directed the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Netflix), the 82-year-old Californian’s all-black ensemble plays well with her ashy white bob: Tucked slightly under her chin, its color is stripped and striped, but its body and character are as full as ever. It serves as a reminder that no matter her age or the style of the decade, her hair always seems effortless and elegant. It was blunt and short in the ’60s, when she released Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the book of essays that put her on the literary map; long and middle-parted to fall into a slight S-shaped wave in the ’70s, around the time she penned The White Album, which included her harrowing story on the Manson murders; fringed and peppery in the ’80s, and up until the early aughts with its Bush politics. Throughout it all, her signature lengths appear as if they’ve been dried in the easy Malibu air—even when she’s physically in New York City. A place where she found her first job, at Vogue, and a place she loved and found love in, with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. New York City was also a place she eventually lost, like many other people and places and things in her life.

Her writing style differs from that of other authors that we have read for a few reasons. One of those is her background. She grew up in New York and worked for Vouge in the 1960’s, and later moved to Los Angeles. This gives her a different perspective than most of the other authors. She has an editorial style to her writing, as well as a different perspective to her writing. Didion’s voice in her writing appeals to me. Her work is somewhat fragmented; this makes it appear more like poetry. It is closer to how we see the world, like the moment you heard big news, and how that moment is comprised of many things: how you felt, where you where, the people you were with, how cold it was outside. In Didion’s world, how we experience news is how we experience the world and that is why the temperature of the air and background music in the bar can seem inseparable from our experience of the event. To shear one off from the other is to only convey a part. Didion has a way of holding back while appearing to let you in. In The Year of Magical Thinking, is an autobiographical account unlike most others. Didion makes herself a case study for the craziness of grief, for the “magical thinking” that consumes people, like if you don’t let someone tell a person is dead, then the person isn’t truly dead. The precision of the works analysis coupled with its extensive display of medical research sets it

Without smoothing the dark edges, Ms. Didion exposes raw intimate details about her life with her husband John Gregory Dunne, fear of motherhood and her perceived inadequacies during her daughter's formative years. She questions the effect

Joan Didion, born in December of 1934, is an exceptional novelist and journalist within modern American society. Among her many successful works, The Year of Magical Thinking explores Didion’s first year as a widow after losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of forty years. Throughout this memoir, Didion focuses on the raw details and occurrences of not only Dunne’s death but their life together. Within an essay published in 1976 titled “Why I Write,” Didion explains that her reasons to write are linked to the pictures that are stuck in her head from past experiences. Taking those pictures, Didion builds a story, a meaning, around them and answers the questions they pose to the audience and to herself. Similarly, in her memoir dedicated

A quick glance into Joan Didion’s life would put readers under the assumption that she identifies as a standard second-wave feminist. A prominent female writer in the 1960s, Didion had initially left me drawing connections to the likes of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Even her stern gaze present on book covers and articles seems to give off a sense of feminine mystique. But after careful venture into her work, it is my understanding that while feminism plays a role in what Didion tackles as a writer, it is merely one lens out of many that she uses to advance her writing. Didion has had an upbringing in Northern California as a “daughter of the Golden West” (Fabian 1), and the stories of her family, along with personal observations

In Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion, Didion talks about her personal story of her experiences in New York as a woman in her twenties. The story is presented in a manner of an essay in which she shares her perception of New York as only suitable for the very young with an aspiration to reach a target of success. This analysis will review Didion’s personal endeavors along with her arguments and examine the excellency of the essay.

I have always enjoyed reading non-fiction because it really has a realness to it that’s not in fiction stories. Also nonfiction stories relate to readers on a much deeper level. However, I could never image myself writing nonfiction stories because I don’t really like writing about my private life, I like to maybe add bits and pieces into the characters I make for my fiction stories. This week’s readings were by far one of the most interesting. The story “No Women Lands” is gripping read because throughout the story every page kept me wanting to know more and understand the mother and the daughter. While I was reading, I noticed a correlation between the mother story of the aunt to “The Scarlett Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne because the aunt

Howell analyzes Munro´s life-writing from the beginning of her career to the her last short-story collection. According to her, Munro does not provide her readers with a coherent narrative about her life. Instead of his, the author restricts her scope to a selected life-span and events that she frequently rewrites, standing in the tradition of feminist new biography (see Howell 80f). For this reason, Howell coins some of Munro´s short story as “non-fiction” (81), “memoir” (85) or “literary non-fiction” (93), Howell does not explain what she exactly means by these terms. Even though she admits that Munro´s life-writing tends to merge fictional and factual elements (see Howell 87), she does not reconsider her terminology. Her classification seems to be based on paratextual statements by Munro (see Howell 79, 87). For instance, she refers to the forewords of The View from Castle Rock and Dear Life to indicate that stories from which collections are not fictional (see Howell 79f, 91f). This seems to be problematical in the case of The View from Castle Rock. Even though Munro draws a distinction between the stories of this collection from her other writings, she points out that their stories are “not memoirs” (Munro II). She even refers to them as fiction: “You could say that such stories

I’ve read a few essays in the past two weeks and learnt a lot. When I put two of those essays together, their different and yet similar ideas have triggered my new concepts about individual and public. And I would love to share that with you.

Over the course of the summer I read Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, Middlesex. The novel depicted the journey of Cal, the narrator, as he struggled with his gender and sexual identity. I found Eugenides’ use of first-person narration compelling because it allowed me to feel a greater connection to Cal, the narrator. Throughout the novel he provided insight on his experiences, while also telling the tale of his family’s immigration to Detroit, Michigan. By relaying stories of Desdemona and Lefty’s early experiences in Smyrna and America I felt as though I gained a deeper understanding of Cal and his family. However, because he was not present during these events, I felt conflicted over whether or not he was a trustworthy, authoritative narrator. He simply retold what information he had been fed, thus I felt he lacked ethos and credibility.