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Joan Didion Cast Off the Fictions of American Politics | The New Republic

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Few writers examined their own assumptions and misapprehensions as intelligently as Didion.

I came to Joan Didion backwards, starting with the wry and savage essays of Political Fictions , and only later working my way backward through her oeuvre. It began in 2001. I was in college. It’s hard to remember now the terrifying political unanimity of that moment, the way that the deep popular cynicism and indifference of the post–Cold War, post – Clinton scandals evaporated on September 11, replaced by a furious national identity that couldn’t brook the slightest deviation from a newly (at least, newly open) warlike national purpose . I was 20, a wannabe radical and political leftist, bar

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