✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Joan Didion’s Specific Vision | The New Yorker

newyorker.com · 864 words · saved by 1 readers

In the face of the failure of narrative to make sense of life, she found meaning in the particular.

Save this story Save this story “Californians invented the concept of life-style,” Don DeLillo wrote, in “ White Noise .” “This alone warrants their doom.” Easy criticisms of Joan Didion echo this idea: that what we think of as life style—domestic spaces and physical objects and self-theatrics, the ways we fashion the hours of our lives—is somehow a lesser object of our attention. Or, rather, that the focus on these realms is a sign of a lack of seriousness, something that should be kept separate from the world of higher thought. Didion’s writing is filled with these life-style markers and cry

Explore this link on the map →

related reading