Personal Narrative: The Love Of Joan Didion

My love of Joan Didion is lifelong and, like anyone does with heroes, always feels at such a distance. In fact, Didion was much closer to me than I could have imagined. For the last years of her life, I became a friend of Susan Sontag?s. I had known that Sontag was ?important? before I met her in 1989, but I had never read anything by her but her famous ?Notes on Camp,? which I confess bewildered me when I first read it as a teenager. After meeting her, I read ?On Photography? and realized that she was a genius. In conversation, she wasn?t always so inspiring. Who is? But I spent enough time with her and her partner, the photographer Annie Leibowitz, to admire her as a person as well as a writer. (When Susan died, she and Annie willed to me a pair of 1914 Corona typewriters, …show more content…
There had been arguments to be sure and the sullen silence that descends upon most relationships after two years of living together smooths out the dinners out and evening drives to the beach. In the inevitable lull that comes after the honeymoon ends, some couples seize an opportunity for renewal. My partner seized an opportunity to teach English in Thailand, ?a country,? he reassured me, ?known as one of the happiest places on earth.? It did not occur to me at the time that moving to Thailand takes planning and forethought, a process that must start months in advance. Like so many things, it all simply seemed spontaneous and urgent, like things falling out of place all at once. Since I was now unemployed, I helped him move his things into a storage unit, one that had been pre-purchased with a staff that seemed to nod at him with an air of familiarity. Shortly before Christmas, I drove him to the airport. He cried; I was silent. His eyes were red when he vanished into the sea of tourists flooding Los Angeles International Airport. ?Good luck,? was all I had time to