I won’t lie: I idolize her. I’ve read every word the woman has ever published. I recently listened to an NPR interview where she explained her writing process, and it was enlightening. I knew her language was as tight as 80’s stretch pants, but I didn’t realize Didion not only sleeps in the same room as a book she’s writing, since she claims “somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're right next to it,” but she also retypes the entirety of what she’s written each morning before continuing. She claims this process helps her maintain the continuity of the work. She’s also much more attentive to craft (putting the “literary” in literary nonfiction) than the majority of memoirists. Influenced by the likes of Hemingway and Henry James, she’s as attentive to diction and syntax as the best poet.

Didion couldn’t be more the opposite of the melodramatic, self-indulgent, sloppy memoirists we’ve seen in recent years. She is unforgiving in her approach to her subject matter, she never stops short of the key questions, and is unwilling to arrive at easy answers, or, sometimes, any answer at all. You are most likely to be familiar with recent New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Winner "A Year of Magical Thinking" which obsessively chronicles the year following the death of her beloved husband, author John Gregory Dunne. Anyone who has ever thought they might be losing their sanity to grief will find this account brutally familiar in its honesty and detail.

If you need somewhere to start, I’d suggest beginning with her early book "Slouching Toward Bethlehem." The title is derived from Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming” (Things fall apart;/the center cannot hold;/ mere anarchy is loosed upon the world) and paints a picture of California in the 1960s as a time of personal and social fragmentation. If you’ve ever been tempted to romanticize the 1960s for the freedom and great music with which it is associated, this book will provide a fascinating counterpoint. Also, if you are interested in “new journalism,” this book provides a lovely mix of subjective experience with research and fact, and utilizes literary devices such as dialogue and narrative along with information Didion gathered in her work as a journalist.

In her preface to the book Didion writes, "I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder." And coming to terms with disorder, a rather Zen concept, is a big part of what Didion’s gorgeous work is all about. I’m not about to do Didion one iota of justice in this blog post, so please, just go read her work! Particularly if you have the ambition to write and are as interested in beauty and truth as you are getting published and making a load of cash, Joan Didion is a writer for you.