Locator: 48028DIDION.
But, if one needs more , from Evan.
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The Book Page
Every once in awhile I have to re-read the Joan Didion wiki entry to remind me how prolific she really was.
Joan Didion died three years ago, December 23, 2021. Born in 1934 she died at age 87.
I was reminded of Joan Didion again with this essay over at Lilith. The author reflects on the current conflict in Gaza and how Joan Didion had processed other similar events. The author writes:
This war, to me, was Hitchcockian; I felt it was coming but didn’t know when. Anyone who thought otherwise, I thought, was lying (or had never read the Bible). There were some who believed that peace was achievable through diplomacy alone and that war was nothing but a violent, intrusive thought on the path to like-mindedness. When the early reports of the music festival massacre pulsed through my devices, I knew this wasn’t so. I reacted as one does to the death of a friend who has descended into madness, the thing whispered at their funeral: Shocked, but not surprised.
Didion described this feeling in “The White Album.” She remembered the morning after the Manson Family murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others. Didion had developed an almost snobbish distaste for hippies and burnouts, but she also recognized and railed against the broken systems that produced them.
At the time of the murders, Joan Didion and Sharon Tate both lived in the hilly enclave of Los Feliz. The “dangerous social pathology” of the hippie movement was no longer something she was just observing. The chaos had found its way into her private life. She wrote, “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
On October 7, 2023, the tension broke, for both Israelis and Palestinians. The paranoia was fulfilled. Shocked, but not surprised.
Didion's personal memoirs about a year in her life, 2007, made the Amazon list of 100 best books to read in one's life. The link at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Year-Magical-Thinking-Joan-Didion/dp/1400078431.
