![]() ![]() ![]() Given the number of writers who, especially early in their literary lives, go through a period of Didion-mania intense enough to put most of her vital statistics permanently at their fingertips (the rain-soaked silk curtains in the apartment on 75th Street! the house on Franklin Avenue! the Corvette!), you would think we’d have seen at least as many biographies of her in the past 40 years as have been written about Taylor Swift in the past two (nine, if you must know). It’s remarkable, then, that Tracy Daugherty’s The Last Love Song is the first full-length biography ever published of Didion. Revered (worshipped, in many cases) as much for her glamorously aloof public persona as for her infectious, revolutionary-in-its-time prose style, Didion was-and remains-famous in a way that writers seldom are anymore (and, though some of today’s embittered literary types like to believe otherwise, seldom were even back then). She has been an object of aspirational longing. Maybe that’s part of the reason Joan Didion, who’s been called all those things but for whom cool is surely the most frequently applied adjective, has never been just an inspirational figure. ![]() For women writers, you can add solipsistic and confessional. Neurotic and introverted are generally in heavier rotation. For most writers, cool is a word that rarely tops the list of personality descriptors. ![]()
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