Whether you love Joan Didion or have finally learned to live without her, you have to accept that she’s been buzzing lately. Even if you personally find her writing “solipsistic, histrionic, and gratuitously portentous” (all fabulous SAT words), many English majors love her because she makes you feel like writing matters. Her Céline ad provided the sartorial set with a new image to take apart — and it also brought Didion to the forefront of the fashion world.
Didion speaks to your college self; and even more so to the post grad struggles you experience. Some might call her quotes (and your experiences) cliché, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel them, or her words, any less deeply. (After all, a cliché is cliché for a reason.) If you can read “Goodbye to All That” and not think about your own post-grad potential, you’re probably never going to escape your hometown. As long as you remember that, “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before,” it’s easier to handle whatever lies ahead.
