Joan Didion

minds. Joan Didion demonstrates this concept of imagination in her essay On Keeping a Notebook. She uses a spiral structure; a concept of fragmented perception of thought, to engage her reader and to explain why she keeps a notebook. Didion starts her essay with one of her notebook entries “”That woman Estelle,’ … is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today.’ Dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper, hotel bar, wilmington RR, 9;45 a.m. August Monday morning (Didion 1).“” Didion…

see their children dead (Didion 13).’” Joan Didion utilizes this quote from Euripedes in her memoir Blue Nights which addresses the death of her daughter, Quintana , and it reminds that reader that losing a child is considered one of the hardest things a person could ever go through. For Didion this loss was only made more crippling because of it’s close proximity to the death of her husband, which occurred less than two years earlier. Within the pages of the memoir, Didion works on coming to…

The short essay “On Self-Respect” written by Joan Didion is dedicated to the discussion of the question of human self-respect as a psychological phenomenon. The author aimed to answer the following questions: what does the self-respect actually mean, what contribution does it make to human life and habits, and what should be done to develop and maintain the feeling of self-respect. According to Didion (1961), the concept of self-respect is not something that can be dedicated to a person in…

The White Album The White Album by Joan Didion is a scrapbook of well-written and vividly detailed personal memories of Didion in the 60s. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Using this sentence as the opening to her essay establishes interest within the reader. Didion uses amazing imagery to describe her first hand experiences. The book is a collection of thoughts and themes that Didion explores throughout her life, by recording all her opinions and ideas. This book is an exploration…

writers who emerged from the developing New Journalistic news writing style, Joan Didion earned fame in circles filled with intellectuals thanks to the perceptive, penetrating, and poignant commentaries she crafted on cultural rebellions and political conditions in America. Her news writing style was a first in the journalism world and helped the woman to stand out among peers who adhered to established traditions. Didion made it a point to simplify her prose and stress its rigor and…

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…

In El Salvador, published in The New York Review of Books, helped carry the message of desperate South American politics into the public eye. While these were positive influences that brought necessary media attention to the West, I find that Joan Didion was unable to fully experience the grittiness and disorder on her two week trip to El Salvador, unlike Unferth who spent months there joining and becoming a “Sandinista” herself. Both of their experiences are completely different but have…

Reading Responses #4 The reading, On Keeping a Notebook, by Joan Didion, is an exceptional excert discussing on why one would write in a notebook. Joan uses many different perspectives to look at the idea of a person writing, why they do it and what it means to them. She starts off by talking about a tiny note that she had written in her notebook one August morning. The note had no context and little information. She had wrote it so that she would remember what she wanted or had taken from that…

In Joan Didion’s excerpt ‘The Promise of the Prison’, from The People and Promises of California, Didion talks about California and the hopes residents were instilled by the building of prisons. The prisons being built were going to provide protection and a substantial amount of job opportunities for residents. Didion mentioned that by the year 2000 California had over “33 penitentiaries and 162,000 inmates,the largest in the western hemisphere.” This number has increased since then not just in…

Famous female author, Joan Didion, wrote “The Santa Ana” to educate readers about the reactions of the LA population to the notorious winds in the area. She writes about how “The winds show us how close to the edge we are” (Didion 47). Every person has a different metaphorical wind that forces him or her to fall off of their own personal cliff, and mine is depression. Depression is a commonly misunderstood mental disorder. Some people even use it as a description or an emotion, for example, “Oh…