Clouds over the sunshine state

Throughout her successful writing career, which began in New York in the early 1960s, the American essayist, novelist and critic Joan Didion has demonstrated two qualities not often found together: emotional fragility and moral strength. As the cover photograph on this new book shows, she looks frail, exuding nerves and tension from behind huge, and trademark, dark glasses. She has written openly about her own vulnerabilities and, in her fiction, about shy, thin-skinned women hovering on the brink of psychological collapse; her most memorable novel, Play It As It Lays, has just such a heroine who stays sane by driving the freeways around Los Angeles for hours on end.

At the same time, though, she has demonstrated over and over again, especially in her long critical essays about American politics and society, that as a journalist she is fearless, humorous and tough, with a cold eye for pretension and a sharp ear for hypocrisy and cant.