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Author Lili Anolik thinks that readers have gotten Joan Didion all wrong.

In a piece in Vanity Fair this month, she argues that Didion’s rise as an icon is “not just wrong, egregiously wrong, wrong to the point of blasphemy.” Check it out:

I’m talking about the canonization of Didion, Didion as St. Joan, Didion as Our Mother of Sorrows. Didion is not, let me repeat, not a holy figure, nor is she a maternal one. She’s cool-eyed and cold-blooded, and that coolness and coldness—chilling, of course, but also bracing—is the source of her fascination as much as her artistry is; the source of her glamour too, and her seductiveness, because she is seductive, deeply. What she is is a femme fatale, and irresistible. She’s our kiss of death, yet we open our mouths, kiss back.

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Annie Dillard and Joan Didion will be our guides today in English 135. Voice and meaning will be our quest. We'll consider, for a moment, these two sentiments.

Can both be true?

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The New York Public Library (NYPL) has acquired the archive of the New York Review of Books magazine. This publication garnered great fame for featuring pieces by several beloved writers such as W. H. Auden, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer.

The NYPL team estimates that the materials will require about three years to fully process before it can be made available to researchers. Some of the notable items from the archive include letters, telegrams, emails, drafts, manuscripts, and galleys.

Here’s more from the press release: “The archive includes a wealth of correspondence between editors Silvers and Epstein and The Review’s wide range of authors over the magazine’s 50-year existence. This outstanding correspondence provides unique evidence of intellectual life in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. In addition, letters to The Review detail the lively literary disputes that have long given the magazine its character of intensity and passion for factual correctness. The archive shows the evolution of the magazine as it took a vocal role in opposition to both the Vietnam War and later wars in Iraq.”

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Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye To All That is being developed into a feature film.

The film will be the first from Carlson Sullivan Pictures LLC, a new production company from producers Megan Carlson and Brian Sullivan.

Deadline.com has the scoop:

This is yet another Didion work to be optioned as her novel A Book of Common Prayer has also been picked up for a feature treatment by Campbell Scott. Carlson and Sullivan are currently focusing in on female writer/directors to bring the essay to the screen.

Didion is also starring in a new documentary about her life called We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live. Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne is currently working on the documentary with co-director Susanne Rostock.

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At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels? Looking for a guide that will best demonstrate how to knit argyle socks? Need a book for [...]

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I can never use the term "in the gloaming" without thinking of my friend Alice Elliott Dark's perfect and classic short story by that same name. And so, last night, leaving the city at the gloaming hour, I thought of Alice. I thought of Joan Didion, too, and Rebecca Solnit, and all those writers who have captured this shade of sun-glinted blue with words.

The city was eager for spring, and full of its promise. Rittenhouse Square and its horn player, a little spontaneous drumming on the side. Restaurants and their outdoor seats. People reading on benches with their coat collars high.

My husband and I were there at the end of a long moving week—cleaning our son's now vacated city apartment at Spruce and 16th, and imagining him at the park in his new near-Manhattan 'hood. Sharing a meal at Serafina. Going home in the old Wrangler, two for-sure empty nesters now.

Meanwhile our son texts me this morning, his first day of his first full-time job. Up at 5:30, he confides. At Starbucks. Excited.

There's dusk. And then there's dawn.

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I found him in Berlin.  I watched him work—fearless before every single blank page.  A quick idea, a suggestion—a tightrope walker, say—and the color was rolled and sliced, the painting set to dry.  It was that easy.

Today the fog lifts slowly.  I'll grab the train, walk 30th to 40th, meet with a student, then set off for my class. Three new young writers will be joining us this week.  We'll talk diaries, Joan Didion, Chad the Minx, Dawn Powell, Judith Malina, Joyce Carol Oates.  We'll wade through definitions.  We'll preface Geoffrey Wolff. 

And then we'll take our cameras, and we'll walk.

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I won’t make you wait for it. My apologies for the spillover into the sidebar, but it would require actual skill to adjust the size of the photo. So, like, that’s not happening!

This is Mark Twain’s first-floor library in his Hartford, Connecticut, home. How cool is that?

You can thank Emily Temple of Flavorwire for that shot, since she recently compiled a hot batch of photographs featuring the libraries of famous writers, inspired, in part, by the recent publication of Leah Price’s new book, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books.

Below, a few more of my favorites . . .

Joan Didion, John Dunne, daughter Quintana Roo, and dog.

William Faulkner collected old books, apparently. Oh, wait.

Anne Sexton’s shelves look so . . . normal.

Norman Mailer lived in Brooklyn Heights, not far from my brother. But Norman had more books, and a better apartment. He also liked lamps.

This Rolling Stone gathers no moss, but collects books, obviously. If you are really in a Keith mood, go here for my ultimate “Keef Sings” mix.

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I was harder on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking than many readers were.  I thought it at times too self-consciously clinical, too reported, less felt.  Many of my students at the University of Pennsylvania disagreed with me.  I listened.  Of course I did.  I wanted to be convinced.

I do not feel disinclined about Blue Nights, which I have read this morning and which will break your heart.  The jacket copy describes the book as "a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter."  It is that; in part it is.  But it is also, mostly, as the jacket also promises, Didion's "thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old."

A cry, on other words, in the almost dark.  A mind doing what a mind does in the aftermath of grief and in the face of the cruelly ticking clock.  Blue Nights is language stripped to its most bare.  It is the seeding and tilling of images grasped, lines said, recurring tropes—not always gently recurring tropes.  It is a mind tracking time.  It is questions: 

"How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?"

"What if I can never again locate the words that work?"

"Who do I want to notify in case of emergency?"

Joan Didion, always physically small and intellectually giant, is, as she writes in this book, seventy-five years old.  She is aware of light and how it brightens, then fades.  She writes of blue—a color and a sound that has long obsessed me, and has obsessed writers like Rebecca Solnit.  She writes of the gloaming, a word I will forever associate with the immensely talented Alice Elliott Dark. 

Here is how she writes:

You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.  The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue."  To the English it was "the gloaming."  That very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.

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I reviewed Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, which is both gorgeous and terrible (terrible in the King James sense of awesome, dreadful, and fearsome, like when God appears to Moses).

In 2003′s Where I Was From, Joan Didion tells of a long wagon journey on which her great-great-grandmother buried a child, gave birth to another, contracted mountain fever twice, and sewed a quilt, “a blinding and pointless compaction of stitches,” that she must have finished en route, “somewhere in the wilderness of her own grief and illness, and just kept on stitching.” Throughout the book, Didion ruminates on her female forbears, women “pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically radical, given to breaking clean with everyone and everything they knew,” even their own dead babies.

It was Didion’s adopted daughter Quintana, at age five or six, who first made all this heredity start to seem remote. And if the author harbored any lingering doubt about whether she shared her ancestors’ breaking-clean tendencies, the shattering effect of Quintana’s death in 2005, at age 39, must have swept it away. In her new memoir, Blue Nights, about life before and after the loss of her daughter, Didion writes, “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.”

You can read the full review at B&N Review, watch Didion reading from the book in a Daily Beast video, and listen to her talk about it at NPR.

Previously: Didion on psychiatric trends and diagnoses; the specter of the unanswered letter; “I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress”; and a short but revealing 1970 TV interview with Tom Brokaw.

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The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) dedicated an entire week of essays to Joan Didion and her new memoir Blue Nights. Six writers shared their thoughts about the new book; one essay was published each day this week.

The group includes LARB senior fiction editor Matthew Specktor, Take One Candle Light a Room author Susan Straight, literary journalism professor Amy Wilentz, Cool Shades author Amy Emphron and LA Times columnist Meghan Daum. The last piece, written by Los Angeles Without a Map novelist Richard Rayner, will be published tomorrow.

LARB editor-in-chief Tom Lutz gave this statement in the release: “Didion is an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life. In 1976 she wrote that ‘[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.’ That attention to style, structure, perspective, and meaning animates the essays we’re featuring this week.”

continued…

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Film and stage legend Vanessa Redgrave will narrate the audiobook edition of Joan Didion‘s upcoming memoir, Blue Nights.

The book will explore the tragic death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. In 2007, Redgrave played the great journalist in the theatrical adaptation of another Didion book, The Year of Magical Thinking.

Here’s more from the Joan Didion Info blog: “in 2009, Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter, the actress Natasha Richardson died in a skiing accident in Canada … The resemblance of their personal tragedies seemed to give rise to a close friendship between the two women. Didion was reported at the time to have visited Richardson in hospital in New York shortly before she died.”

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In the 1980s, novelist Joan Didion collaborated with her late husband John Gregory Dunne on a script for Norman Mailer‘s novel, The Deer Park. The adaptation has collected dust ever since.

Now Mailer’s son, film producer Michael Mailer, wants to shoot the Didion-Dunne screenplay. According to The Daily, Mailer will collaborate with producers Cassian Elwes and Matt Palmieri on this project.

Here’s more from the article: “The Deer Park chronicles two romances during Hollywood’s Red Scare era. It was rejected as obscene by Mailer’s publisher in 1955.” Norman Mailer (pictured, via) adapted The Deer Park into a stage play. It opened off-broadway in 1967 and ran for 128 performances.

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In her forthcoming memoir, Blue Nights, Joan Didion remembers the way her daughter’s (above, left) psychiatric diagnosis kept changing. Manic depression became OCD; OCD became something else, something she can’t remember now, but something that ultimately gave way to many other conditions before “the least programmatic of her doctors settled on one that actually seemed to apply”: borderline personality disorder.

Diagnosis never seems to lead to a cure, Didion observes, only an enforced debility. But as with a psychiatric evaluation of herself conducted in 1968 and excerpted in The White Album (and quoted in part below), Didion sees and reflects on the truths of the assessment even as she ponders it at arm’s length.

I’ll have much more to say about her new book when it’s out in November, but this paradoxical blend of skepticism, acceptance, and astringent detachment in matters pertaining to psychology and its insights and connection to the culture, has always characterized Didion’s writing. It’s one of the reasons I’m so drawn to her work.

In the title essay of The White Album, the one that begins with the famous line “We tell ourselves stories in order the live,” she recalls “a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition, but one I found troubling.” She continues:

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the mid-point of my life I wanted still to believe in narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical…

Another flash cut:

In June of this year patient experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out… The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses and increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress… Emotionally, patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings. Her fantasy life appears to have been virtually completely preempted by primitive, regressive libidinal preoccupations many of which are distorted and bizarre… In a technical sense basic affective controls appear to be intact but it is equally clear that they are insecurely and tenuously maintained for the present by a variety of defense mechanisms including intellectualization, obsessive-compulsive devices, projection, reaction-formation, and somatization, all of which now seem inadequate to their task of controlling or containing an underlying psyhotic process and are therefore in process of failure. The content of patient’s responses is highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations, and basic reality contact is obviously and seriously impaired at times. In quality and level of sophistical patients responses are characteristic of those of individuals of high average or superior intelligence but she is now functioning intellectually in impaired fashion at barely average level. Patient’s th

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