Joan Didion

has a new memoir coming out, and there's a nice profile of her in today's LATimes. Here are some of my favorite bits--

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," she begins "The White Album," then undercuts the sentiment almost immediately: "Or at least we do for a while." Implicit in those lines is a recognition of the fundamental friction between the shaping impulses of literature and the chaos of the world. "It's just a tension you never resolve," Didion explains, eyes pale, unwavering. "I think I was writing 'Democracy' [her 1984 novel] when it came to me that, as well as I might describe the palm trees, it wasn't going to get me anywhere."

[...]

"All I know now," she declares there, "is that writing … no longer comes easily to me" — a statement that echoes her admission in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" "that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke." The more things change, in other words, the more they never do.

And so, on this Thursday afternoon in her living room, Didion continues to work it through. "Let me try again to talk to you directly," she writes in "Blue Nights," speaking to her readers as if the book were a kind of intimacy. And: "I tell you this story just to prove that I can." There it is, that push to tell, to observe, and then the deepening: "That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story." Here again, Didion is triangulating, positioning herself, commenting on the inability of narrative to sustain us even as she invokes it just the same. Or, as she puts it, surrounded by all her familiar photographs: "I didn't think I'd get through this book. But I did. You always do."

Read the whole thing here.